This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Kindles, soaring costs, a general crisis about readers and their waning attention spans. The last couple of decades haven’t exactly been plain sailing for those in the book business. It’s not surprising, then, that stories of a supposed golden age of publishing have begun to crop up.
Last year gave us Thomas Harding’s The Maverick, a biography of the publishing giant George Weidenfeld told through the 20 books that defined his career. Now Anthony Cheetham, the legendary editor who founded Orion, Century and Head of Zeus, has decided to take a turn at the microphone. His resulting memoir, A Life in Fifty Books, makes Harding’s 20 seem modest. It is a lavishly illustrated survey of a career that enabled its subject “to roam across the entire spectrum of human experience, endeavour and belief”.
The entire spectrum of human experience is not, however, what Cheetham’s reader comes away with. Unlike Harding’s biography, which sheds light on Weidenfeld’s four marriages and other romantic interludes, Cheetham’s memoir is rather thin on the kind of personal detail that tends to enliven a life story.
Perhaps this comes down to the distinction between memoir and biography: the author of one’s own life can’t help but be at pains to come across positively. Given the material Cheetham could have worked with, though — born in Mexico, raised in Vienna, educated at Eton and Oxford, based in Norway before being welcomed into London’s publishing industry — it’s disappointing that he doesn’t throw us a bone or two.
He insists, for example, that being carted off to boarding school at the age of seven (“a spartan boot camp and a refuge for paedophiles”) was a “not unhappy” experience. The episode is dealt with in two pages that eschew all but a few measly details about bowls of porridge and rugby matches. Cheetham may be editorial royalty, but his storytelling leaves something to be desired.
One of the book’s strongest assertions of feeling comes when he announces gravely, at the end of a chapter on his years at Balliol, that he came away with a second-class degree. “This was a profoundly disappointing result. I felt — and still feel — that I let down not only myself but also some of the most inspiring teachers at Eton and at Oxford.” One can’t help but be bemused that Cheetham, now in his eighties, is still wringing his hands at an exam result, but can look back on other major life events — his decision to go into publishing, his multiple marriages, a major redundancy — without recollecting much emotional turbulence.
Despite a dearth of spicy details about Cheetham, those hoping for gossip about the publishing industry won’t come away empty-handed. He depicts a golden era when deals were made over wine-soaked London lunches and “war stories” were shared during long evenings in Jimmy’s Bar at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
For Cheetham, being a great editor meant attempting to drink Kingsley Amis under the table (an impossible task: after one particularly epic bout of lunchtime drinking, Cheetham was “catatonic with alcohol” whilst Amis went merrily off to deliver a “word-perfect” 4pm interview on Channel 4).
Meanwhile, those holding the purse strings ruled with tyranny. Whilst working at Macdonald Futura, one of the subsidiaries of the British Printing Corporation controlled by Robert Maxwell, Cheetham was treated by Maxwell variously as “a courtier or a confidant, as a sounding board or a punchbag”. Cheetham’s enjoyment of it all, however, exudes from every page.
He boasts of having a nose for bestsellers that led to successes such as Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. To his credit, he doesn’t shy away from admitting a few howlers: he turned down Richard Dawkins’ atheist manifesto The God Delusion, for example, “because I didn’t believe it would sell”. Oops.
Admissions such as this are the exception in a memoir otherwise firmly self-congratulatory. This satisfied tone is not without justification. It’s clear that alongside all the drinking and drama, Cheetham did a lot of hard work, utilising a stamina demonstrated early in his career when, whilst an editor at Sphere Books, he wrote a 40,000-word book about Richard III in three months. But according to his final chapter, “The Future of Publishing”, the world of publishing as Cheetham knows it is vanishing.
As demand for books dwindles, publishers are “trimming” costs by “conducting their business online to reduce the expense of rented office space”. However, whilst Cheetham’s heyday appears to have been characterised by bolshy personalities, nepotism and a rather toxic drinking culture, you’ve got to admit: he’s had a lot of fun.
