Memoirs of a genius

Tom Maschler, son of a distinguished Jewish publisher, was born in Berlin in 1932 and came to England with his parents in 1939. After Leighton Park School, having turned down a place at Oxford, he worked on a kibbutz and as a tour guide, hitch-hiked round America and did a brief stint of National Service before getting himself discharged on health grounds. He then worked for various publishers: André Deutsch, whom he left because André wouldn’t increase his wages of six pounds to eight pounds a week, MacGibbon and Kee, where he wasn’t allowed to publish Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Penguin. In 1960 he became Literary Director of Jonathan Cape only a month after Cape himself had died.

There he did what other gifted literary publishers have done. He used the invaluable backlist as a springboard to revitalise Cape’s slightly faded glory. Having inherited such distinguished authors as Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Malcolm Lowry, C.