A good editor and a good man

Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor and philanthropist David Astor, was too ‘saintly’ for a lively biography. As a publisher, she had worked on an earlier authorised tome, and thought she knew.

Lewis, and Astor, proved more resilient. There are always column inches in a well-connected plutocratic clan such as the Astors. And Astor’s mother, Virginia-born Nancy, was the gold-plated battle-axe who made Cliveden, the family house in Buckinghamshire, the centre of 1930s appeasement.

The story is really how Astor (born in 1912) took on his Christian Scientist mother, threw off the trappings of privilege, and became the owner and editor of the Observer during its mid-20th-century heyday. He was enough of a ditherer to spark Katherine Whitehorn’s (supposed) barb, ‘The editor’s indecision is final.’ But he was resolute in his opposition to all manifestations of injustice, particularly apartheid.