Kindred Spirits: Adrift in Literary London

(Paperback, Main)

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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.

Author Bio

Jeremy Lewis worked for many years in publishing afteer leaving Trinity College, Dublin, in 1965. He was a director of Chatto amp; 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.