A seamless whole

This short memoir deserves a longer review than this, encompassing, as it does, migration, intellectual excellence, a successful professional life, two marriages, children and an honesty and contentment not usually found in close proximity.

Miriam Gross (née May), with a Jewish legal background (both her parents, who left Nazi Germany in 1933, were lawyers), was brought up in Palestine, then under the British Mandate, where she stayed until 1947. In Jerusalem she felt little affinity with other exiles, only with the landscape. From the start, she seems to have been clear-sighted to an unusual degree. Unfazed by her unmaternal mother, she drew close to her father, from whom she derived an understanding of men which was to be useful in both her public and emotional future lives.

Unusually attractive, speaking little English, she does not appear to have suffered from loneliness or alienation when she finally moved to England, although in London her most cherished companion was a dog. At Dartington Hall, and later at Oxford, she studied her contemporaries with little comprehension. She was ready to fall in love, and indeed much inclined to do so, perhaps as a result of her upbringing. Her attachments are recounted without sentimentality. But what mainly fascinated her was the range of wiles and tactics displayed by other girls.
No slouch herself, she was essentially an observer.

As is usually the case, she discovered that working life could be much more instructive than any formal education. Her long and successful career at the Observer and at the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, starting as a secretary and progressing to various editorships, as well as instigating a books slot on Channel 4, she found completely fulfilling. There are few complaints about the work/life balance. She was fortunate in both her husbands, John Gross and Geoffrey Owen; fortunate, too, in her mentors, notably Terence Kilmartin.