The outsider who felt the cold

The journal ADAM — an acronym for Art, Drama, Architecture and Music — was the life’s work of a Jewish Romanian exile Miron Grindea (1910-95), who was its only editor. Embodying a style of cosmopolitan cultural sophistication, it represents a fascinating episode in the history of the London literary world, its bent being more internationalist than Bloomsbury’s and less Bohemian than Fitzrovia’s or Soho’s.

Having started ADAM in Bucharest, Grindea arrived in London on the fateful day of 1 September 1939, re-establishing the journal in 1941 on the thoroughly insecure footing on which it steadfastly remained. But as it tottered heroically from financial crisis to financial crisis — at one point in the 1970s, Grindea sold the entire enterprise to the publisher Frank Cass, only to buy it back again at the first opportunity — ADAM published an astonishing selection of unpublished material, all of which Grindea had wheedled and winkled out of its authors or owners with his infuriating yet irresistible mixture of Eeyore-ish charm and bloody-mindedness.