George Weidenfeld at home in London, 2010.

The Weidenfeld Way

A new biography tells the story of the famed publisher George Weidenfeld, of London’s Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an uproarious character who stood at the meeting point of the literary and society worlds

By Peter Osnos

I was surprised recently to encounter full and favorable reviews in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for a new book called The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing, a biography by Thomas Harding. It is based on complete access to the archives of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, the London-based publisher Weidenfeld co-founded (with the illustrious Nigel Nicolson) only a few years after he’d arrived in the city at age 19, a Jewish refugee from Nazi-held Austria.

Really, I wondered, how many Americans are curious enough about this British publisher—he was Baron Weidenfeld of Chelsea, a member of the House of Lords, when he died at age 96, in 2016—to pay $29.95 for the hardcover released by Pegasus Books, a respected, small independent publisher in New York?