Highly regarded for his founding and talented editing of the vigorous, influential literary journals New Writing, Penguin New Writing, and the London Magazine, John Lehmann has had a long literary career, which began with a collection of poems in 1931 and now includes prose poetry, novels, travel books, histories, analyses of the contemporary scene, literary criticism, literary biography, autobiography, and essays. Lehmann is a creditable poet, and his early novel Evil Was Abroad (1938) continues to find readers, but it is nonfiction prose in which he has been notably prolific and impressive. One book, The Open Night (1952), is avowedly a collection of essays, and many other essays appear as chapters in travel books, histories, and autobiographies.

His father, Rudolph Chambers Lehmann, of German extraction, married Alice Marie Davis and settled at Fieldhead in Buckinghamshire; John was born to them on 2 June 1907 and spent his childhood at Fieldhead. At Eton from...