Kirjahaku

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.

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 masses 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 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. 'Lewis's book is a triumph ... a rich and humorous history of 20th century reading habits, Penguin Special will not be surpassed' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'A word of warning: the enjoyable swiftness of Jeremy Lewis's prose can seduce the reader into going too fast, but savour this book slowly, don't gobble it up. It is so richly stuffed with facts, people, perceptions and atmosphere that you may get indigestion if you do not allow it the time it deserves' Diana Athill, LITERARY REVIEW

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.

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.With a sharp eye for the absurd and a fond sympathy for life's eccentrics, in Playing for Time, Jeremy Lewis treats us to uproarious tales from his time in Dublin in the 1960s, mad escapades in Europe and America, life amidst the snares and delusions involved in growing up in middle-class England in the 1950s, and of his ever unrequited passion for the ever unattainable ffenella.Richard Cobb enjoyed this book so much he managed to review it twice, a quote from one will do.'I like books that make me laugh, and Jeremy Lewis's Playing for Time kept me laughing every night in my local for a week'.

Tobias Smollett was a prodigious wordsmith. Grub Street was his habitat and hack work his staple, but, as Jeremy Lewis vividly makes clear in this biography, the first for nearly sixty years, there was much more to Smollett than that..His own life seems almost as eventful and picaresque as one of his novels. Born in Scotland, apprenticed to a surgeon, he came to London to make his fortune. He failed. He served as a surgeon's mate in the West India Squadron and was present at the disastrous attack on Cartagena. He lived in Jamaica for a while, where he married. He returned to London and practised unsuccessfully as a physician. His first novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random was published in 1748. He was editor of the Critical Review and The Briton. His violent political, literary and personal partisanship often landed him in trouble and he spent a brief period in prison for libel. His miscellaneous writings were voluminous, but it is as a novelist that his reputation survives. Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker, both comic masterpieces, alone ensure that. There is also his travel book Travels through France and Italy, shockingly xenophobic and, as Osbert Sitwell said, 'choked with prejudices', but for all that, very readable. There are few better biographers than Jeremy Lewis, and he recounts the life and escapades of Tobias Smollett with the sort of gusto that shows him to be completely en rapport with his generous but curmudgeonly subject.'Lewis's book could scarcely be bettered. It radiates first-hand enjoyment for which there is no substitute.' John Carey'A lively and unpretentious biography of the most politically incorrect novelist ever to set pen to paper.' Sunday Times 'Lewis details (Smollett's) escapades with a sense of novelistic bawdy that Smollett himself would surely have appreciated.' Observer

`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.

A useful guide for young scientists and an aid in their science fair showcases. This book offers 15 unique experiments with clear instructions, explanations and recommendations that encourage young students to challenge their mind and make the most out of their science fair experience.

The story of Penguin Books, Allen Lane and how they changed the world, to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Penguin'An invaluable and fascinating account' NICK HORNBY'Outstanding' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS'A triumph . . . rich and humorous' ROGER LEWISBy founding Penguin Books in 1935 and popularizing the paperback, Allen Lane not only changed publishing in Britain – he was also at the forefront of a social and cultural revolution.In The Man Who Changed the Way We Read, Jeremy Lewis brings this extraordinary era brilliantly to life. Lane’s books gave millions of people access to what had previously been the preserve of a wealthy few; they alerted the public to the threat of Nazi Germany; and Penguin itself became a cherished national institution, much like the BBC and the NHS, whilst at the same time challenging the status quo through the famous Lady Chatterley case.This is the spellbinding story of how a complex, highly fallible man used his vision to change the world.'Rakish and racy . . . 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' DAILY TELEGRAPH

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