Miriam Gross, as a journalist and editor, has worked with some of the most influential figures of the 20th century poets, philosophers, playwrights and politicians. This book offers recollections from 40 years at the heart of English cultural life. Brought up in wartime Jerusalem, she was deposited by her parents, speaking no English, at the bohemian Dartington Hall School; and then continued her education at Oxford where eschewing her quiet, tea-drinking contemporaries at St Anne s she found her way into more glamorous academic circles. From there it was a short hop to pre-spell-check Fleet Street. Her descriptions whether she is having to mend her boss's bra on her first day at work, or rewriting Angus Wilson's slapdash book reviews, or being asked to make the women s pages of the Observer more raunchy show a merciless eye for the bogus and the absurd. Alongside reflections on everything from feminism and motherhood to education and anti-semitism, she recounts her numerous infatuations, both requited and unrequited, with the sort of self-deprecating candour that makes this memoir a classic of its kind.

Edith Anderson left America for Berlin in 1947 to join her German husband - an exile from the Nazis - who had returned to his homeland to build a new country from Hitler's ruins. Max Schroeder had been a surrealist poet/playwright in his bohemian twenties, but when Edith Anderson met him in New York at the height of World War II, he was a seasoned, forty-three-year-old political activist editing an anti-facist periodical in English and German. Edith, a struggling young writer from the East Bronx, worked first at the The Daily Worker, and then as one of the first "American railroad girls."