‘The Maverick’ by Thomas Harding
In the 1950s, Weidenfeld & Nicolson became one of Britain’s—and the world’s—prestige publishing houses. The firm’s prime mover, George Weidenfeld, was an outsider determined to crash the gates. He arrived in London in 1938 as a young Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna. He spoke English poorly but had a gift for conversation in many languages and an irrepressible drive to climb the ladder. Thirty years on he was a member of the House of Lords.
British author Thomas Harding’s fascinating account opens a window onto postwar intellectual life through Weidenfeld’s relations with authors, a big tent of talent that included Isaac Asimov (Foundation), Isaiah Berlin (The Hedgehog and the Fox), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Joan Didion (The White Album), James Watson (Double Helix), Saul Bellow (Herzog) and Keith Richards (Life).
Harding doesn’t flinch from his subject’s worst traits. Weidenfeld married advantageously and divorced two years later after a slew of infidelities. His close relations with women proved unsustainable. Harding quotes Isaiah Berlin who asked of Weidenfeld, “Is there a total absence of a moral centre?” Some of his business practices seem less than honorable and yet, he was in love with books, the learning they represented and the art of writing and printing. Uninterested in hewing to contemporary pieties and dogma, Weidenfeld published across a wide range of opinions in an effort to reach an intelligent general public. Does that public still exist in the same number today?
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