Experts on the books that shaped them

By The Week Staff

published 11 September 2017

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Updike called it 'a vast sweet sea' and he was, as usual, spot on. Everything about Proust, the writer and the man, is riveting and beguiling. It took me a year to read his oceanic novel but I think about it and him all the time. You can't help it. He gets under your skull. And Proust really is for everyone. The building next to our shop on Curzon Street was under renovation last year and one of the Irish builders became a pal. He regaled me with extracts from Proust, which he read in the original French. Boy, those Irish can read. Chapeau Paddy!

The other principal Paddy at Heywood Hill is the immortal Patrick Leigh Fermor, who wrote a number of legendary baroque tales masquerading as travel books. This is my favourite. Paddy loved our shop (and even lived above it for a few weeks) and set up an account here for his former lover, a Romanian princess, when she was marooned behind the Iron Curtain. It was our job to make sure that she didn't go short of good books. We have turned this idea into A Year in Books, a tailored monthly subscription for readers worldwide. At the moment we have subscribers in over 50 countries, so hopefully we are getting something right.

Good biographies should be banquets and this is an epic feast of a book about an American town planner. Sound interesting? I promise it will change your life. So much so that when the author visited our shop the other day I dropped to my knees with forehead to ground in obeisance. He is the world's greatest living biographer and this, his first book, is an unforgettable multi-layered masterpiece and portrait of a man, a city and a culture. One of the pleasures of working at Heywood Hill is meeting one's heroes and Mr Caro did not disappoint.

At Heywood Hill one of our most distinguished former colleagues was Nancy Mitford. She worked in the shop for three years during World War 2 and officers would flock to the shop to chat with her. She was also busy refining her writing style and we like to think her time at Heywood Hill influenced this gloriously witty novel published soon after. We create libraries for all sorts of people on all sorts of subjects around the world and this is one of the few titles that I include in almost every project.

I read this book with its wild and brilliant conceit as a teenager and devoured every word the great man wrote. He was a customer and my predecessor had a hand in helping it into print. Long after the author died we were asked to sell his books, which we did with great pleasure. We like finding new homes for good books. On this occasion we asked Dominic West to dress up as Flashman and he swanked around Mayfair twirling his whiskers and sword and stopping traffic in the process.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox