Jovial Writer Whose Books Evoked A Vanished Literary World

Jeremy Lewis 1942-2017

Jeremy Lewis, who has died aged 75, was a writer, editor, publisher and memoirist – and “one of the best-loved figures in the London literary world”, said The Daily Telegraph. A “Grub Street irregular”, was how he described himself. Bear-like, bespectacled and amiable, he was almost pathologically self-effacing. But his “silly ass act” – in the words of his cousin Roger Lewis – was a carapace that concealed his gifts as a writer: a perceptive observer, he wrote several acclaimed biographies, and “three splendidly funny volumes of autobiography”.

In the preface to the first, Playing for Time, Lewis acknowledged that it was absurd that a “nonentity” such as himself, who had lived a life “short on incident”, should be writing an autobiography; he said that he hoped its existence would be justified by its being “entertaining, evocative of place and a particular way of life”, and by capturing some of life’s absurdity and sadness. And indeed, “he made non-achievement fascinating”. His memoirs were witty, insightful and moving, beautifully conjuring a vanished postwar world of distant parents, chilly boarding schools, and congenial publishing offices peopled by corduroy-clad eccentrics, where work started late, lunches were long, and editors were unconstrained by commercial targets.