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JOHN LEHMANN: A PAGAN ADVENTURE

From the flyleaf:

John Lehmann was the creator of Penguin New Writing and The London Magazine, the partner of the Woolf’s at the Hogarth Press, and a poet. In this major new biography, his professional and private lives are brought together for the first time. Here are Lehmann’s troubled friendships with Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and revelations concerning his painful relationship with his sister, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann.

Here, too, is an account of his passionate friendships with, among others, Michael Redgrave, the Greek poet Demetrios Capetanakis, Adrian Liddell Hart, and the dancer Alexis Rassine.

Adrian Wright is the first biographer to have explored the great cache of Lehmann’s revealing private journals and correspondence that chart his progress through 1920s Cambridge, 1930s Vienna and London at war, to America in the 1970s. He presents a vivid portrait of an extraordinary man who, at last, steps from the footnotes of the literature to which he gave so much.

REVIEWS

At last, to put it vulgarly as this admirable book often does, John Lehmann has found his Mr Wright.

David Hughes, SPECTATOR

Detailed, explicit and sometimes very funny, A Pagan Adventure restores to his rightful position an important British literary figure.

Peter Burton, GAY TIMES

Wright’s writing sometimes becomes as over-wrought as his subject’s painfully obsessive affairs, yet where it really matters, Wright performs a real service.

Mark Bostridge, INDEPENDENT

Adrian Wright’s excellent biography … an attractive book about an unattractive person.

D J Taylor, LITERARY REVIEW

Wright sympathetically conjures up the blacked-out, hemmed-in Britain where Penguin New Writing found an immediate welcome. Wright is gallant, attempting ‘to rescue Lehmann from the margins of the literature of which he was once at the heart’.

Penelope Fitzgerald, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS