An Almost English Life
Miriam Gross
Miriam Gross’s life casts a fascinating insight into the British establishment from an outsider’s perspective.
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 she found her way into more glamorous academic circles.
Her descriptions – whether mending her boss’s bra on her first day at work, or rewriting Angus Wilson’s slapdash book reviews — show a merciless eye for the bogus and the absurd. She reflects on everything from feminism to anti-semitism and recounts numerous infatuations, both requited and unrequited, with self-deprecating candour.
Miriam Gross is a Jerusalem-born journalist. She has been a literary editor of The Sunday Telegraph and an arts editor of The Daily Telegraph. She is a diarist for The Spectator and the author of An Almost English Life, a memoir.
Daniel Johnson
