This is a hugely inspiring book. Inspiring because of the subject, George Weidenfeld, one of the world’s most influential and successful publishers of the twentieth century, with a keen eye for the social and political problems of his time, but certainly also inspiring because of the form. Biographer Thomas Harding ‘chose to explore George’s life through the books with which he was associated’. This means that books by writers such as Saul Bellow and Nabokov will be included, but also non-fiction by Henry Kissinger or Kurt Waldheim. These micro-stories are designed in such a way that they read as glimpses into so many aspects of cultural and social life in the second half of the 20th century. A man with a cultural and political network, the likes of which will rarely be equaled, a gifted biographer, what a combination! 

Thomas Harding, The Maverick. George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing. Pegasus Books, New York-London 2023.