David Astor: a life in print
Jeremy Lewis
A recurring motif in the mournful commentary on the recent announcement of the demise of The Independent – or more accurately, its move online – was that of a singular voice being silenced. The inference was that a distinctive contribution to the culture could only be realised in a tangible, daily, ink-on-paper artefact. But behind that was another idea: that a newspaper is, as Andrew Marr put it, the product of a lively and intelligent conversation between reporters and editors, “a platoon of similarly-minded, but not identically-minded, people”.
The current anxieties about the future of newspapers make Jeremy Lewis’ affectionate and deeply researched biography of David Astor all the more timely. The scion of a fabulously wealthy American family whose good fortune enabled him to fashion The Observer into one of the most celebrated newspapers of the twentieth century, Astor was the epitome of the newspaper editor as impresario.
The mission he set himself on taking over as editor in 1948 was to assemble a collection of talented writers who would spark off each other. To Malcolm Muggeridge, The Observer of the 1950s and ’60s seemed a “Salvation Army for the ideological drunks and bums of our time”. Astor saw journalism as “a creative or semi-artistic occupation” dependent on “a free supply of talents from all walks of life”.
