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“... the police.’ In 1961 he enters into correspondence with the publishing house of André Deutsch. Diana Athill was to become his editor there. Her book After a Funeral takes up the story when, in 1963 on a brief visit to London, Ghali comes to a party at her house. Miss Athill sets the tone from the first page. She ...”

“... hospital, she still wanted to make changes. But in March Max died, and Jean wrote to her editor, Diana Athill:   I’ve dreamt several times that I was going to have a baby ...   Finally I dreamt that I was looking at the baby in the cradle – such a puny weak thing.   So the book must be finished, and that must be what I think about it ...”

“... to melodrama, say, or in the case of Judith Hearne, a sort of tragedy. In 1957 in a letter to Diana Athill, his editor at André Deutsch, he wrote: I always want to give my character more diversity, more intellectual strength – something of that wonderful Dostoevskian quality of the unexpected, which, on examination, turns out to be the ...”

“... In the 1970s, there were very few women in the business. The famous exceptions, such as Diana Athill at André Deutsch, and Norah Smallwood at Chatto & Windus, were still not fully in charge. Carmen’s triumph at Virago made other women’s advancement in publishing possible. She was no separatist, however, and acknowledged how much she owed ...”

“... with most of whom she quickly established a remarkably lively and gossipy relationship. Diana Athill, John Guest, Terence Kilmartin, and many others, were recipients of chat, grumbles, doubts, jokes, questions, japes – often with cross-references to each other: if one editor disapproved of a new poem, she told you, and shot it in your ...”

“... to have him snapped up by Deutsch rather than Cape, providing the cue for an admiring sketch of Diana Athill, perhaps, rather than Tom Maschler. So, again, the effect is strongly intended, though bizarre. Haley and McEwan don’t blend into a composite. Instead, Serena and her author begin to alternate in the reader’s construction of the narrative ...”

“... Staying in Castries for the wedding was a young man called Mr Kennaway. When he watches me I can see that he doesn’t think I am pretty. Oh God, let me be pretty when I grow up. Jean Rhys was 12 at the time of the wedding in Castries, on the island of St Lucia. At the age of six a photograph had been taken of her: she looked very pretty then in a new white dress ...”

“... most people who’ve been publishers’ readers will tell you that that never happens. But one day Diana Athill came into my cupboard and said: ‘Will you just have a look at these, they’re by a West Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul’, I read them and wrote Diana a report in which I said: ‘I know we never do short ...”

“... pushy? He might have been better liked. Many of the harsh reviews of Publisher had kind words for Diana Athill’s memoir Stet (2000). Athill declines the title Maschler grandly bestows on himself. ‘I was not a publisher,’ she writes, ‘I was an editor.’ Athill, as her memoir ...”