An Almost English Life

A sparklingly witty memoir, which takes us on a seductive journey from wartime Jerusalem to the heart of Fleet Street, providing a riveting outsider's view of English cultural life.

“I read in almost at a sitting, so enjoyable and absorbing it was.”

Tremendously enjoyable. Beautifully written. A real pleasure.
A terrific memoir. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of literary editing, the observations on modern stage production and the childhood recollections in Jerusalem.
Acute, impassioned and dauntingly honest, this is the remarkable story of one of the great observers of our time.
As a record of a fulfilled life, Miriam Gross's account is almost startling - modest and well-written - exemplary. Spectator
This memoir has the quality of a long conversation with a very interesting woman - it has enough packed into its 250-odd pages to supply other writers with material for any number of jumbo-sized novels - it is, to use Gross's highest term of literary commendation, so damnably readable. New Statesman
**** Riveting - remarkable - Miriam Gross has written far more than a delightfully candid account of her life at the centre of several overlapping power networks. In addition to her perceptive criticisms about literacy levels in schools she has an interesting point to make about the persistence of 'genteel' anti-Semitism in this country. Mail on Sunday
Unfailingly intelligent and elegantly written this memoir is absorbing reading - I lapped it up in one sitting. Daily Telegraph
Artfully written An Almost English Life achieves what few memoirs might intend - it casts the world rather than the writer into the spotlight. Financial Times
Marvellous - Her interviews are classics of the genre. Standpoint *

Miriam Gross has worked on the Observer, as deputy literary editor and then as woman's editor; on the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph as arts and literary editor; and as senior editor on Standpoint magazine. She is the editor of two collections of essays, The World of George Orwell and The World of Raymond Chandler and the author of So Why Can't they Read?, a pamphlet on literacy in London's state schools.

She tells her story in a series of vivid vignettes life as the only child of ambitious parents in Jerusalem; her bohemian school days at Dartington Hall in Devon; discovering the glamour of philosophy at Oxford; and then cutting a swathe through British journalism, a pre-spellcheck world populated by a mixture of chauvinists, scholars and bon vivants who seemed rarely to miss a deadline despite spending more time at lunch than at their desks. This is a book filled with remarkable characters. The author s friendships with many of the key figures of 20th century intellectual life and her many infatuations, requited and unrequited, are recounted with the sort of self deprecating candour that makes this memoir a classic of its kind.

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