Book description
The humour of self-deprecation is peculiarly English. Few people do
it better than Jeremy Lewis. His first two autobiographical volumes -
Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits - are being reissued in Faber
Finds to coincide happily with his third volume - Grub Street
Irregular - being published by HarperCollins. The second volume of
Jeremy Lewis's wonderfully entertaining autobiography sees him
starting out, with a mixture of diffidence and self-professed
incompetence, on a career in publishing. Along the way we see him
tucking into cod and chips with Jane and Geoffrey Grigson, drinking
tea with Kingsley Amis and retsina with Patrick Leigh-Fermor. When
reviewing this book, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson called it 'The
funniest book I have ever read about publishing...this is not merely a
hugely entertaining book, but an important one'. That judgment still stands.
Jeremy Lewis worked for many years in publishing after leaving
Trinity College, Dublin, in 1965. He was a director of Chatto &
Windus for ten years, and the deputy editor of the London Magazine from
1990 to 1994. A freelance writer and editor since 1989, he has been the
commissioning editor of the Oldie since 1997, and the editor-at-large of
the Literary Review since 2004. He has written two volumes of
autobiography - Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits (both now available
in Faber Finds'), and a third, Grub Street Irregular was published in
2008. He has written biographies of Cyril Connolly, Tobias Smollett and
Allen Lane, and is currently working on a book about the Greene family -
Graham Greene's siblings and first cousins - to be published by Jonathan
Cape.
