Slightly Foxed continues its tradition of publishing a stocking-filler for Christmas
The Reluctant Biographer
Jeremy Lewis
Paperback • 148 x 105mm • 48pp • ISBN 978 09551987–2–4
When Jeremy Lewis was booted out of his comfortable job as an editor at Chatto & Windus he never imagined he would become a biographer. But a bibulous lunch with a friendly fellow publisher and former Olympic fencer set him on the path to a new career. As the authorized biographer of Cyril Connolly he soon found himself sitting at the bedside of the tetchy, pyjama-clad historian A. L. Rowse, helping Connolly’s wayward and flirtatious ex-wife Barbara Skelton move her cats and chattels home from France, and engaging in some delicate negotiations of a personal kind with Lord Weidenfeld.
Anyone who has read Kindred Spirits, Jeremy Lewis’s hilarious memoir of his time in publishing – or indeed his biographies of Cyril Connolly, Tobias Smollett and Allen Lane – will know that The Reluctant Biographer, an account of the pleasures and problems of his second career, has been well worth waiting for.
