David Astor

An exceptional biography of that rarest of creatures – a really good man

Few newspaper editors are remembered beyond their lifetimes, but David Astor of the Observer is a great exception to the rule. He converted a staid, Conservative-supporting Sunday paper into essential reading, admired and envied for the quality of its writers and for its trenchant but fair-minded views. 
 
Astor grew up at Cliveden, the country house on the Thames which his grandfather had bought when he turned his back on New York, the source of the family fortune. His liberal-minded father was a constant support, but his relations with his mother, Nancy, were always embattled. At Oxford he suffered the first of the bouts of depression that were to blight his life; a lost soul for much of the Thirties, he became involved in attempts to put the British Government in touch with the German opposition in the months leading up to the war. 
 
George Orwell had urged Astor to champion the decolonisation of Africa, and Nelson Mandela always acknowledged how much he owed to the Observer’s long-standing support. A generous benefactor to good causes, he helped to set up Amnesty International and Index on Censorship. A good man and a great editor, he deserves to be better remembered.

Jeremy Lewis has written a definitive account of Astor and his world.

Lewis’s affectionate and endearing biography is also a nostalgic celebration of the liberal intelligentsia and metropolitan elite…from the 1940s to the 1970s.  There are many rewards in this book, which is full of old Fleet Street gossip, big names and good jokes.

Jeremy Lewis’s excellent new bio&shy;graphy brings out both sides of this complex figure, tracing the contradictions of his character to his privileged but painfully conflicted upbringing… He gives a marvellous description of the golden age of the Observer.

A fascinating, well-written and brilliantly researched account…. The book is a great achievement.

A lively, gossipy and affectionate biography.

Astor at last gets the posthumous recognition he deserves.

Jeremy Lewis brilliantly analyses the extraordinary family background and Astor’s won personality and manner.

He [Lewis] masters several complex strands of material, writing confidently and entertainingly, while leaving Astor’s halo justifiably intact.

Beautifully written… Lewis brilliantly evokes the golden age of a long-vanished Fleet Street.

Marvellous biography… Lewis Portrays Astor as a gifted amateur… This meticulously researched book takes us back to a lost age.

Lewis is an indefatigable, sharp-eyed researcher… With the publication of this book, David Astor the Editor is well celebrated. As a biographer, Jeremy Lewis is informative, entertaining and fair-minded.

[A] vivid, insightful and sometimes very funny biography… Essential reading, not just for present and aspiring editors, but for anybody who cares about newspapers.

Shot through with a magnificent sly humour.

[It] is well researched and an absorbing read.

A former publisher and the deputy editor of the Oldie, Jeremy Lewis has written three volumes of autobiography and biographies of Cyril Connolly, Tobias Smollett and Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books. Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family, was published by Cape in 2010.

Few newspaper editors are remembered beyond their lifetimes, but David Astor is a great exception to the rule. Growing up surrounded by astonishing wealth (the family home was so large it included a miniature railway to transport meals to the dining room) Astor’s early life was far from idyllic. At Oxford he suffered the first of the bouts of depression that were to blight his life, and he became a lost soul for much of the Thirties but when he took the Observer on in 1948 he converted a staid Sunday paper into essential reading. Employing the likes of Kim Philby, Vita Sackville-West, Clive James and Patrick O’Donovan (who became famous for writing his report on Bobby Kennedy’s funeral before it had taken place) he doubled the circulation and created a paper envied and admired.

A Life

Cyril Connolly

A superative biography of one of the key fogures of English literary life in the twentieth century.

`In one of tje funniest biographies I have ever read, Lewis assembles all the excellently entertaining anecdotes about this deeply loved, much mocked, sometimes reviled figure whose departure has robbed the litarary world of its social smartness and any worthwhile eccentricity . . . [An] excellent, wildly funny and informative biography. `Auberon Waugh, Literary Review. Precociously brilliant in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romatic yearning to recover a lost Eden. His two great books, The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise, are classics of English prose, combining wit, romanticism and merciless self-knowledge. As witty in person as he as in his prose, he was notoriously slothful and greedy; he was married three times, abd his dealings with women were bedevilled by a lifelong tendency to be in love with two or more people at once.

Jeremy Lewis

An invaluable and fascinating account of this country's intellectual and political development

Both hugely enjoyable to read and surprisingly riveting

Lewis's rakish and racy biography ... tells the story not just of a man, or even a firm, but of a cultural makeover that shaped the world as we know it

The Story of Allen Lane and Penguin Books

By founding Penguin books and popularizing the paperback, Allen Lane not only changed publishing in Britain, he was also at the forefront of a social and cultural revolution that saw the millions of people given access to what had previously been the preserve of a wealthy few. 
 
In Penguin Special, Jeremy Lewis brings this extraordinary era brilliantly to life, recounting how Allen Lane came to launch his Penguins for the price of a packet of cigarettes; how they became enormously influential in alerting the public to the threat of Nazi Germany; and how Penguin itself gradually became a national institution, like the BBC and the NHS, whilst at the same time challenging the status quo through the famous Lady Chatterley case. Above all, it is the story of how one often fallible, complex man used his vision to change the world.

Jeremy Lewis

Praise for The Man Who Changed the Way We Read

An invaluable and fascinating account of this country's intellectual and political development

Both hugely enjoyable to read and surprisingly riveting

Lewis's rakish and racy biography ... tells the story not just of a man, or even a firm, but of a cultural makeover that shaped the world as we know it

An invaluable and fascinating account of this country's intellectual and political development

Both hugely enjoyable to read and surprisingly riveting

Lewis's rakish and racy biography ... tells the story not just of a man, or even a firm, but of a cultural makeover that shaped the world as we know it

An invaluable and fascinating account of this country's intellectual and political development

Both hugely enjoyable to read and surprisingly riveting

Lewis's rakish and racy biography ... tells the story not just of a man, or even a firm, but of a cultural makeover that shaped the world as we know it

Books by Jeremy Lewis

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