The man who fought for Lolita

• Weidenfeld's publishing company put out 6,000 titles over seven decades
• READ MORE:  WHAT BOOK would author and former actress Lynda La Plante take to a desert island?

The Maverick

by Thomas Harding (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25, 324 pp)

Presented by his publisher George Weidenfeld with a posse of potential ‘ghosts’ to write his memoirs, Mick Jagger fired off some desultory questions and then demanded — could they roll a three-paper joint?

Weidenfeld was so keen that he committed an unprecedented $2million to underwriting the Rolling Stone’s advance.

But after considerable interest, the deal fell through. Two great seducers had sized each other up, and the rock singer flounced off.

Weidenfeld more usually courted authors at lavish dinner parties in his grand Chelsea flat. He’d pronounce enthusiastically: ‘There’s a book there. A certain best-seller.’ 

Sometimes this approach worked, sometimes not. But for seven decades, from the late 1940s, it enabled this Austrian-born emigré to beguile and bestride the British publishing world as his company Weidenfeld & Nicolson put out more than 6,000 titles.

He took on Britain’s censorship laws with Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita.

When Saul Bellow, an American author he championed, expressed displeasure at the handling of his fiction Herzog, Weidenfeld placated him by shamelessly rigging the jury to enable it to win the prestigious Prix Formentor.

Harding has fun detailing his subject’s four marriages and associated romantic interludes.

In this #MeToo era, the jury remains out. The historian Antonia Fraser recalls a ‘complete gentleman’, but Vanessa Nicolson (the niece of George’s former publishing firm partner Nigel Nicolson) describes him as ‘creepy’.

We’re always on the edge, wondering if George, the cosmopolitan charmer who made it to the House of Lords, will pull another cracker from the hat. 

He was, indeed, an opportunistic gambler, but his love of ideas and his personal ebullience were infectious.