George Weidenfeld was one of the great advocates for high European culture

I am far abroad at the moment but have just learnt the sad news from home of the death of George (Lord) Weidenfeld, at the age of 96. As a publisher, philanthropist, convener, guru and friend he was one of the most extraordinary people in 20th and 21st-century Britain.

Born in Vienna in 1919, he fled the Nazis and came to the UK in the 1930s where he was housed and looked after by a Christian family. Throughout the extraordinary life and career that followed he constantly acted on the gratitude he felt towards the country and people that had taken him in. Only last year he set up a fund to help save Christian children from the fighting in Syria. Asked in a BBC interview why he was prioritising Christian children, he stated with typical clarity that it was because these were the children most under threat.

As a publisher and mentor he knew and helped almost everybody. His friendships with statesmen, writers and other public figures were legendary, and apart from his warmth, kindness and huge encouragement, one of the great pleasures of knowing him was to spur him to reminisce. It was always a profound opportunity to hear him talk of pre-war Austria. But it was equally extraordinary to hear him speak of almost everything that had happened in the world of culture and politics since. No one else could speak with such insight and with such personal experience of Nabokov, Picasso, Isaiah Berlin and a thousand others besides. Before one recent dinner I mentioned a book by Stefan Zweig that I had been reading. ‘Ah, yes, Stefan Zweig’ George began. Of course he had known him in London when Zweig too was in flight from Hitler.