No disrespect to Jeremy Lewis, this third amiable volume of autobiography or his hopeful sponsors at the Harper Press, but it is extraordinary that books like this still get written. Here we are, after all, in the age of the Waterstone’s three-for-two, the novels of Miss Keri Katona and the cheery philistinism of the man at
Hodder Headline who declared that if the public wanted cookery and celebrity memoirs then that is what he would publish for them, yet still, apparently, there is a market for garrulous book-world memoirs fanatically absorbed in what the literary editor of the New Statesman said to his assistant around the time that Hillary climbed Everest.
This is an exaggeration, but not much of one. Grub Street Irregular’s tone reveals itself from the very first paragraph, in which Lewis maintains that as a child he excelled at nothing, was debarred from organised sport by ‘cowardice, short-sightedness, physical ineptitude and a total absence of team spirit’ and displayed ‘no artistic leanings whatever’.
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