FOR ALL THE TIDES OF fashionable cant that continue to spill out of its upper reaches, the UK publishing industry is, was, and you suspect always will be a deeply reactionary concern.
Nowhere is this innate conservatism more flagrant than in the clouds of nostalgia that periodically arise over old-school publishing memoirs and the biographies of titanic book-world figures from days gone by (see, for example, the reviews of Thomas Harding’s recent life of Lord Weidenfeld.)
Ah, the publishers of yesteryear, as V.S. Pritchett might have said. Through
