Kindred Spirits

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 a book about the Greene family - Graham Greene's siblings and first cousins - Shades of Greene.