My last contact with George Weidenfeld was when I asked him to review a book for The Spectator: a life of Stefan Zweig, who has been enjoying a bit of a moment lately. George didn’t fancy it, but I received – very courteous and friendly, as his communications always were – a postcard declining. You could see why I asked, though: George was the one of the last people alive who actually lived in Zweig’s world – that cultured and cosmopolitan Mitteleuropean moment at the tail end of the Habsburg Empire, smashed up irrevocably by the Nazis.
I first met him a couple of years ago when I was sent to interview him by Tatler. I’ve seldom been so in awe of an interviewee. He arrived in London with a postal order for sixteen shillings and sixpence. He founded Weidenfeld and Nicolson. He was Chaim Weizmann’s chef de cabinet (for this, like Bill Deedes moonlighting as a cabinet minister while still working on the Daily Telegraph’s Peterborough column, he took a sabbatical from publishing).
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