Playing for Time

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'.

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.