David Astor
Jonathan Cape 432pp £25
The Week bookshop £21.50 (incl. p&p)
“Journalism and sanctity don’t often go together, but to his admirers, David Astor was a sort of secular saint,” said John Campbell in the FT. The editor, and effectively the proprietor, of The Observer from 1948 to 1975, Astor was “a beacon of serious, high-minded, liberal values”, who supported liberation movements in Africa and Asia, and campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. He also fostered the extraordinary stable of writers that gave the paper its “golden age”, from George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, to Kenneth Tynan and Clive James, to Anthony Sampson and Katharine Whitehorn. Behind these successes, as Jeremy Lewis’s “excellent” new biography shows, was a complex, “painfully conflicted figure”.…