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Lewis, Jeremy

Jeremy Lewis, a well-loved figure of the literary world and a friend of Slightly Foxed, died in April 2017 aged 75. He was a man of letters through and through, and his long career included early bouts of publishing, writing biography, autobiography and journalism, and reviewing and editing. Read more about Jeremy here.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [3] 71; [5] 12; [11] 67; [18] 70; [23] 14; [31] 73; [38] 86; [42] 13; [45] 46; [51] 30; [53] 81; [55] 71; ‘The Christmas Fox II’: The Reluctant Biographer, [12] 6

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20040901171714

Belated Reparation

Jeremy Lewis on Janina David, A Square of Sky

Rereading the books of one’s youth is always a hazardous business, since a magic once lost can never be regained, so I contemplated a fresh assault on A Square of Sky with pleasure tinged with dread. Not that I was that young when I read it last, back in the early 1970s: I’d turned 30, and was working as London’s most ineffectual literary agent. I much preferred memoirs and autobiographies to biographies or post-Victorian novels, and Janina David’s account of her childhood in wartime Poland struck me as a fine example of the genre.
20050301124500 Jeremy Lewis on Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries

Smoke Signals

Jeremy Lewis on Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries

I am wretchedly ill-qualified to write about Simon Gray, since I am hopeless about going to the theatre and have never seen one of his plays. I plan to remedy matters as soon as I can, but in the meantime I cannot recommend his autobiographical writings too highly. An Unnatural Pursuit is, alas, out of print, but Fat Chance, Enter a Fox and the masterly Smoking Diaries have all been reissued in paperback, and only the most Cromwellian theatre-hater could fail to be touched, amused and thoroughly entertained by them.
20060901161654 Jeremy Lewis on H. F. Ellis, The Papers of A. J. Wentworth BA

In a Class of His Own

Jeremy Lewis on H. F. Ellis, The Papers of A. J. Wentworth BA

Books that make one laugh out loud are far rarer than one likes to think, and the subject of endless and often heated debate. P. G. Wodehouse usually comes out top, but although I loved him in my twenties, I have lost the appetite in late middle age: comicality needs to be combined with sadness, a sense of the absurd with a countervailing melancholy, and Wodehouse’s genial socialites seem too lacking in humanity, too short on Chaplinesque pathos, to engage me as much as they once did. One of my candidates for the funniest book ever written – battling it out with Mr Pooter, James Lees-Milne’s Another Self, and a great deal of Evelyn Waugh – is H. F. Ellis’s The Papers of A. J. Wentworth BA, a work that is all too redolent of familiar human frailties.
20080601140757 Daniel Macklin illustration - Jeremy Lewis on Graham Greene, Slightly Foxed Issue 18

Greene but Colourful

Jeremy Lewis on Graham Greene, Journey without Maps

For the past couple of years I’ve been researching a book about the Greene family. The Greene King brewery, on which its fortunes are based, dates back to the Napoleonic period, but since I’m allergic to dynastic histories I’ve decided to concentrate on one generation: Graham Greene’s siblings and first cousins, all of whom grew up in the same small town in the early years of the last century.
20090901122834

A Chequered Career

Jeremy Lewis on Michael Wharton, The Missing Will

I got to know Michael Wharton in the early 1980s, when I was working as an editor at Chatto & Windus. We had commissioned him to write what turned out to be The Missing Will, the first volume of his autobiography, and every now and then I would meet him for a drink in the King and Keys, a narrow, smoke-filled pub next to the old Telegraph building in Fleet Street. It was usually half-empty when I went there during lunch breaks that continued well into the afternoon, but in the evenings, Michael told me, it was crammed to overflowing with his colleagues from the Daily Telegraph, red-faced and sweating and jostling for a place at the bar.
20111201112131 Jeremy Lewis on R. S. Surtees, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour

The Real Thing

Jeremy Lewis on R. S. Surtees, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour

One of Rudyard Kipling’s stories, ‘My Son’s Wife’, features a high-minded young aesthete named Midmore, who spends his days pondering the improvement of society. Midmore inherits a country estate from a widowed aunt, Mrs Werf, and reluctantly pays it a visit. Thumbing through the books in the library, he suddenly realizes with horror what the late Colonel Werf ’s mind must have been in its prime: for the colonel, like Kipling, was an enthusiastic reader of Surtees, the mid-Victorian hunting novelist, and Midmore is exposed to an attitude to life – sceptical, brisk, tough-minded and unsentimental – diametrically opposed to his own. ‘It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time,’ Kipling tells us, ‘a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, match-making mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands, Jews, tradesmen and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens and horsedung characters.’ Unable to put it down Midmore reels off to bed clutching a copy of Handley Cross, one of Surtees’s milder creations.
20170901175057 George Moore by Henry Tonks, 1901 - Jeremy Lewis on Esther Waters

Life on the Fringe

Jeremy Lewis on George Moore, Esther Waters

I first read Esther Waters more than fifty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. As a young man I enjoyed reading tales of unmitigated woe, in which one disaster succeeds another, and the novel’s eponymous heroine suffers more than most at the hands of assorted drunkards, snobs, gamblers and predatory employers. And, as an Englishman in Ireland, I was fascinated by the complexity and ambiguity of relations between the two countries, and by Irish views of England ‒ of which Esther Waters is a remarkable and unusual example.
20160901111913

A Battersea Childhood

Jeremy Lewis on Richard Church, Over the Bridge

Richard Church is remembered, if at all, as a late-flowering Georgian poet and a busy man of letters who contributed reviews to such long-forgotten periodicals as John O’London’s Weekly, and who in due course became Dylan Thomas’s baffled and increasingly embattled editor at J. M. Dent. But he deserves to be better known, if only for one book. Published by Heinemann in 1955, Over the Bridge is the first volume in an autobiographical trilogy.
20150301111914

Marching with Marlborough

Jeremy Lewis on Ronald Welch, Captain of Dragoons

Published in 1956, Captain of Dragoons is set in the reign of Queen Anne, during the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession, and the relevant member of the family is Charles Carey, ‘a tall, lean young officer of Dragoons, with a crop of black hair cut short for comfort under his wig, and a pair of inky black brows that were convenient warning signals that his quick temper was rising’; he is also one of the most brilliant swordsmen in the Duke of Marlborough’s army, and is given ample opportunities to display his prowess.
20140601110246 John Moore, Portrait of Elmbury, Plain Foxed Edition

Down Tewkesbury Way

Jeremy Lewis on John Moore, Portrait of Elmbury

‘I have written a book which gives me much pleasure. It is a kind of full-length portrait of a small country town – this small town – between the wars. The sort of life that will never come back,’ John Moore told T. H. White in the summer of 1945. Already a well-established and prolific professional writer, Moore had written Portrait of Elmbury in six weeks after leaving the Admiralty Press Division in London to return to his home town of Tewkesbury, and it was to form the first part of a trilogy based on Tewkesbury and its surrounding villages. Portrait of Elmbury and Brensham Village were both published by Collins in 1946, and The Blue Field followed two years later: the names of places and people had been changed, but the disguise was lightly worn.

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