Few newspaper editors are remembered beyond their lifetimes, but David Astor of the Observer is a great exception to the rule. 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.  Meer

Talks about the era in which the masses were given access to what had previously been the preserve of a wealthy few - books. This title recounts 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 more.  Meer

An autobiography that shows the author starting out, with a mixture of diffidence and self-professed incompetence, on a career in publishing.  Meer

Features tales from the author's 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.  Meer

`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 .  Meer

Tobias Smollett was a prodigious wordsmith. Grub Street was his habitat and hack work his staple. This biography reveals that there was much more to Smollett than that.  Meer