The humour of self-deprecation is peculiarly English. Few people do it better than Jeremy Lewis. His first two autobiographical volumes - Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits - are being reissued in Faber Finds to coincide happily with his third volume - Grub Street Irregular - being published by HarperCollins. With a sharp eye for the absurd and a fond sympathy for life's eccentrics, in Playing for Time, Jeremy Lewis treats us to uproarious tales from his time in Dublin in the 1960s, mad escapades in Europe and America, life amidst the snares and delusions involved in growing up in middle-class England in the 1950s, and of his ever unrequited passion for the ever unattainable ffenella. Richard Cobb enjoyed this book so much he managed to review it twice, a quote from one will do.'I like books that make me laugh, and Jeremy Lewis's Playing for Time kept me laughing every night in my local for a week'.

An engaging, wickedly funny and splendidly anecdotal memoir of a career spent among writers, agents, publishers and bookmen and women of every stripe. Jeremy Lewis's first memoir, 'Playing for Time', was hailed by James Lees-Milne as 'the funniest and best written book I've read for years.' His second, 'Kindred Spirits', was described by John Carey as 'sheer pleasure from start to finish'. Now he has written a third autobiographical account of his encounters with literary figures over the last two decades which fittingly caps the previous two. A rich sense of the absurd and a profound understanding of the extreme comicality of life, together with a delight in the oddities of human behaviour, are the hallmarks of Jeremy Lewis's world. Bumbling figures of the book trade and eccentric luminaries of Grub Street alike are grist to his mill; his characterisations of André Deutsch, James Lees-Milne, Alan Ross, Richard Cobb, Barbara Skelton and dozens of others – are written with huge...

The humour of self-deprecation is peculiarly English. Few people do it better than Jeremy Lewis. His first two autobiographical volumes - Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits - are being reissued in Faber Finds to coincide happily with his third volume - Grub Street Irregular - being published by HarperCollins. The second volume of Jeremy Lewis's wonderfully entertaining autobiography sees him starting out, with a mixture of diffidence and self-professed incompetence, on a career in publishing. Along the way we see him tucking into cod and chips with Jane and Geoffrey Grigson, drinking tea with Kingsley Amis and retsina with Patrick Leigh-Fermor. When reviewing this book, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson called it 'The funniest book I have ever read about publishing...this is not merely a hugely entertaining book, but an important one'. That judgment still stands.