RIP David Pryce-Jones (1936-2025), A True Man of Letters Whose Work Revealed Anti-Semitism in the UK

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January 11, 2026 Update

As an addenda to the tribute below I published last month about British man-of-letter David Pryce-Jones, in which I mentioned that he and actress Helena Bonham-Carter were cousins, I want now to share an article by Juliet Conway in the Daily Mail that highlights their close relationship:

“Helena has long credited David’s 2015 memoir Fault Lines with helping her understand the dramatic history behind the ‘melting pot’ that is her maternal heritage.

The book recounts life at Royaumont with Helena’s maternal grandparents, Eduardo Propper de Callejon – the Spanish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews by issuing illegal visas – and his wife Helene, known as Bubbles, an Austrian-Jewish heiress from the Springer industrial dynasty.

‘It would make a great sitcom or drama,’ Helena has said of the family’s wartime adventures. ‘There were so many characters, so dramatic and funny and bonkers. And David captured it all.’

His death marks the passing of the last of a generation whose real-life dramas—wartime heroism, family feuds, literary scandals —were as vivid as anything in Netflix’s The Crown, in which the actress played Princess Margaret.

And as Helena once joked: ‘I’d have to approach [Crown writer] Peter Morgan. “I’ve got a whole other family story for you. Forget the fifth, and sixth seasons [of The Crown]. You’re coming with me, mate.”‘
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December 17, 2025

I was saddened by the recent passing of David Pryce-Jones (1936-2025), which I read about in a Times of London obituary. (It’s linked to here, though you may hit a paywall, so I’ve also pasted it in below in five sequential screenshots.) We became acquainted via letters and email, beginning in 2023, though never met in person. I had sent him a letter after discovering his books thanks to a biography, The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing by Thomas Harding. Harding’s book on the dynamic British publisher Lord Weidenfeld (1919-2016) was not a cradle-to-grave biography, but instead devoted a chapter to a dozen or so of the most important books Weidenfeld published in his prolific career, some of which courted controversy; among them were Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Watson and Crick’s The Double Helix, Nabokov’s Lolita, and a writer who was then new to me, David Pryce-Jones and his nonfiction book Unity Mitford, a Quest, published in 1976.

One of the five Mitford sisters, Unity had a notorious romance with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. For writing about her life some members of the Mitford family sued Pryce-Jones for libel, intent on suppressing the book, while some upper crust Brits inveighed against Pryce-Jones for spotlighting deep currents of anti-semitism in British society; he was Jewish, and as a three-year old had been evacuated from France through Dunkirk where he was when WWII began. Weidenfeld and Pryce-Jones were faced with a decision to halt publication, or go forward, despite the threat of significant monetary damages if they lost in court. They refused to back down, the book was published, and Pryce-Jones was vindicated; it is still in print today.

I found the whole story of his family, told in the memoir Fault Lines, quite inspirational, particularly the actions of his maternal grandfather, a Spanish diplomat named Eduardo Propper de Callejón who during WWII, defied contrary orders from the Franco government and used his diplomatic portfolio to sign visas for refugees; his bravery warrants a place for him alongside the heroic exploits of the American journalist Varian Fry, who helped rescue Jews in France, and the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who signed visas for many in Lithuania. Indeed, Propper de Callejón is honored at Yad Vashem. Among David’s relatives was the British actress Helena Bonham-Carter, also a grandchild of the Spanish diplomat. She explores the WWII period in this interview on youtube. Among the people her and David’s grandfather saved was the person who later started Unicef.

The Times of London obit explains that he had a complicated relationship with his father Alan Pryce-Jones, who was editor of the Times Literary Supplement. The elder Pryce-Jones can be seen in a fascinating interview he conducted with W. Somerset Maugham in 1955, also on youtube. The Maugham interview, which my adult son and business partner M. G. Turner discovered during Covid, led to me recognizing the name of David Pryce-Jones when I encountered it in Thomas Harding’s book on Lord Weidenfeld.

David was a true person of letters, the likes of which there are few today, among men or women. He was a foreign correspondent, memoirist, essayist, novelist, biographer, and devoted letter writer. Another book of his that I enjoyed enormously was Signatures, in which he tells the stories behind the many inscribed books that populated the bookshelves in his personal library, chronicling more than ninety literary relationships in his life, among them with W. H. Auden, Beryl Bainbridge, Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Paul Bowles, Cyril Connolly, Martha Gellhorn, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Alfred Kazin, Amos Elon, Philip Glazebrook, Arthur Koestler, Jessica Mitford, V. S. Naipaul, Edna O’Brien, Alan Sillitoe, Muriel Spark, J. B. Priestley, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Hugh Nissenson, and Dame Rebecca West, among many others. It is an extraordinarily enjoyable book. Just two pages from the Table of Contents are shown below in blue type. He led an extraordinary life, and was a kind man. RIP. 

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Elaine Dewar (1948-2025), Stellar Writer and Dear Friend, RIP

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I’m sharing with friends and readers of The Great Gray Bridge that a dear friend and talented author, Elaine Dewar, passed away yesterday—age 77, after a brief illness—in Toronto surrounded by her loving family, including her daughters Anna Dewar Gulley and Danielle Dewar Birch. Elaine was a very accomplished journalist and author who specialized in reporting on and writing about challenging subjects, especially cutting-edge science as it intersected with culture, business, and society. I had the privilege of working on four of her seven books. A Jewish funeral was held at a chapel in Toronto today, and I was able to sit in on it via youtube with my wife. We both benefited over the years from Elaine’s kindness and hospitality. I wish we could have been in Toronto to pay a shiva call at the family home.

Beyond our strong professional links, she was a tremendously steadfast friend—having us stay in a comfortable bedroom in her home numerous times when visiting Toronto, always reminding us that it was there for a getaway when needed. She also had my back after 2009, the year that I became an independent editorial provider in the book business, with me no longer holding an in-house publishing position. One manuscript of hers that I edited was Smarts: The Boundary-Busting Story of Intelligence, which I also covered on this blog in 2015. As I wrote then, just editing it had made me smarter (a bit, anyway :-). Her intellectual curiosity was prodigious. While working for Carroll & Graf Publishers, I’d published the US editions of two of her earlier books—Bones: Discovering the First Americans, on the ancient peopling of the Americas, and The Second Tree: Clones, Chimeras and Quests for Immortality, a kind of nonfiction version of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx and Crake. Those books had been edited and published in Canada, so having the chance to edit Smarts was a treat. The fact Elaine went out of her way to hire me for the well-paying freelance assignment of editing the manuscript, so lengthy that it became a nearly 600-page book, shows her loyalty.

Later, she undertook tenacious investigative reporting to chronicle a hidden history that combined business and culture. This story, of a secret corporate consolidation in the Canadian book publishing industry mingled with improper obeisance to the interests of a particular multinational publisher, became her book The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada’s Best Publisher and the Best Part of Our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational (Biblioasis, 2017), which was nominated for the Governor’s General in Nonfiction. She asked me to read early chapters of that book, which I did happily, and with great interest. Prior to her death, Elaine completed a final book, which will be published next year, Growing up Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Indian Hospitals, and the Use of Indigenous People as Slaves of Race Science, another Canadian exposé, which Biblioasis describes thus: “An investigative journalist reckons with the cost of settler privilege in this gripping exposé of racism and unethical science.” Speaking during the funeral today, her daughter Danielle described the forthcoming book as a memoir of sorts, one of which Elaine had never written.

There have already been other tributes to Elaine, along with this one chronicling important and interesting parts of Elaine’s life and work I didn’t know about. One is by her lifelong friend, Marci Macdonald, and is available on the website of Benjamin’s Funeral Home, which also hosted the video of the service today. Significantly, her current editor, Dan Wells of Bibliosasis, writes movingly on his site The Bibliophile of editing Growing up Oblivious in person with Elaine in her last days. He also has a valuable perspective on the writing and editing of “researched nonfiction,” which I realize now can correctly be said to have been Elaine’s true metiér.

I will always think fondly of Elaine, and her husband Stephen Dewar (d. 2019), seated at the breakfast table in their cozy kitchen, CBC Radio program Metro Morning on the dial, newspapers open, when I came down for a morning meal, and they each greeted us with humor and charm.
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Sold: “John McGraw: The Tumultuous Life and Times of Baseball’s ‘Little Napoleon'” by Daniel R. Levitt

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Very excited to have sold a great new baseball book to Rob Taylor at University of Nebraska Press, one of the very best editors and publishers of sports books. John McGraw: The Tumultuous Life and Times of Baseball’s ‘Little Napoleon’ by Daniel R. Levitt. It will be the first full biography of the New York Giants’ legendary player-manager in two decades, apart from a 2018 book that focused mostly on McGraw’s many ejections from games. As described in my announcement of the deal, his “acumen as a field general was unparalleled, with innovations in play that enlivened the dead-ball era….[But with] gambling and on-field fisticuffs common….McGraw, a diminutive second basemen was usually among the brawlers; on the base paths, belligerence reigned as just one or at most two umpires enforced the rules, and McGraw and opponents often tangled in mutual brazen aggression.” With a tip of the ball cap to publishing pal David Wilk, who referred the author to me. For publication in 2027. #baseball #biography #NewYorkCity #DeadBallEra

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To the Summit of Mt Everest or Bust, Fueled by Xenon Gas

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In the present era of international mountaineering in the Himalayas, which began in the early decades of the twentieth century, seasonal weather patterns mean that May has long been climbing season on the great peaks, including Mt Everest. The devastating events in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, when eight climbers died on Everest, occurred in May 1996. Here’s a fascinating article on a summit attempt that is taking place right now, in May 2025. Four British soldiers-turned-mountaineers are attempting to summit Everest, and raising money for charity through their effort. That part’s okay, or normal enough, if you discount the reality that far too many people now try to climb Everest every year, with veritable traffic jams happening on the most popular routes and chokepoints, like the South Col, and lots of refuse is left on the mountains that then must get carted down at some point. The article started to become strange for me when I read that the quartet is going to try to do it in only seven days, while most teams take a month or even more. Most expeditions have their team members acclimatize to the oxygen-depleted atmosphere, because altitude sickness above 6000 meters (or around 19,700 feet) is common, and what can be a death zone is above 7900 meters (around 26,200 feet). It is hoped that the more time climbers spend adjusting to this altitude, they will be better able to handle all the rigors, keeping in mind that the summit of Everest itself is higher still, at 8,849 meters (29,356 feet). This often means that for the climactic stretch of the ascent, climbers can be very ill and struggling with multiple debilities, including mental confusion and bad decision-making, which can lead to fatal mis-steps and mistakes.

However, to achieve their lightning-quick ascent the four British climbers are experimenting with unproven medical stratagems to acclimatize their bodies in advance of ever even traveling to the Himalayas last Friday. Back home they’ve been sleeping in oxygen-deprived tents (dubbed “hypoxic tents,” as they tried to create conditions that mimicked those they’ll encounter this week on the mountain. They report nights of terrible sleep the past several months, and express some uncertainty as to whether the tents have helped, though they’ve stuck with using them for months. Even more bizarre, though, are inhalations of xenon gas they’ve been administering to themselves the past few months, in hopes of boosting their red blood cells; they’ll also use xenon gas again once they’re in situ.

Unsurprisingly, the expedition has attracted criticism in the mountaineering and the medical world from people who believe what they’re doing is not only unproven, it’s and potentially dangerous. The team members claim they’ll have a lighter environmental footprint, and it’s no more dangerous than any other summit attempt. In addition, though mountaineering—unlike competitive sports such as cycling and tennis, which have governing bodies that monitor athletes’ blood and urine, and try to hold them to account if they use banned substances—has no official body to sanction the British climbers, or even to rule on whether what they’re doing is ethical or justified. To them, apparently, it’s an acceptable risk, and they won’t be stopped from making this attempt though it may prove foolhardy.

wapo.st/4358woo

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One Year Ago Today…

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One year ago today, July 15, 2023, was a Saturday. I had strapped on my helmet—and as is typical for me—taken a late afternoon bike ride around Riverside Park and the upper west side in Manhattan. As I got close to home, I rolled up to the edge of the crosswalk where W. 103rd Street crosses the northbound single-lane service road that runs parallel to Riverside Drive, and stopped to see if any cars were coming. I spotted a black car which seemed stopped at the intersection, which is marked on both sides of the road with red metal stop signs, with the same command  painted in white on the pavement. I waited to see if I could safely cross to the sidewalk on the other side. There were no other pedestrians or vehicles nearby, so I gave a wave of my hand to get the driver’s attention in the black car to indicate I was going to pedal across. Unbeknownst to me, the driver had apparently only come to a rolling stop, and may not have seen my wave at him. Suddenly he hit the gas and the car began accelerating through the intersection and into the crosswalk. In fragmented milliseconds, I experienced the sinking thought, “Oh, god, he’s probably gonna to hit me. I’m glad I have my helmet on!” I pedaled harder and almost got through to the other side of the crosswalk, but the car hit me with what I think was its right front bumper. It struck me on the right side of my body and I landed on the pavement on my left side—knee, elbow, forearm, shoulder—getting dragged along the road for several feet. I had almost gotten through the intersection, but the car’s speed had overtaken me before I could get through. I think he was going about 15 mph. He definitely did not observe the stop sign,

I bounced up as quickly as I could manage to get away from the now idling car and squatted on the curb, hauling my damaged bike along behind me. I started inspecting my body for injuries, immediately finding a bloody knee and calf. (I was wearing shorts so my leg was scraped raw.) The driver stopped and got out of the car, presumably to see how injured I was, looking mortified at what he’d done. In a controlled but raised voice I said: “You had a stop sign, but you didn’t stop, you rolled through it and hit the gas! Do you know you did that?!” He sheepishly agreed, though he later claimed to the cops when they arrived that he had stopped at the stop sign. This was false, and in the immediate aftermath of the collision that he caused, he admitted it. Later, I learned from the guy’s driver license, issued by the state of New Jersey, that July 15 was his birthday, and he volunteered to my son that he had been looking for a parking space as he drove around the neighborhood. There is no legal parking on the Riverside Drive service road, so he wasn’t going to find a spot there.

Since I was close to home, I phoned my wife and son who were alarmed of course and said they would come right over.

While waiting for my family to arrive I called 911. When I told the dispatcher that I had been hit by a car which knocked me off my bike and I landed on the pavement hard, they said they would send an ambulance and the police.

I found that a neighbor woman had been walking by with her husband and their dog she told me she saw it all happen. She confirmed to me what I wrote above, including that the driver hadn’t stopped, and added that she had actually seen me under the car for a moment. She gave her name and phone number to my wife and said to call her if we wanted her to speak to the police.

The ambulance arrived first so the EMTs put me on a stretcher in the back of their vehicle and drove me to Mt Sinai Hospital, at the Morningside Hts. location, while my family waited to speak with the police, or so I hoped. Had I known better—and this is the #1 lesson if you’re involved in a collision—I would have asked the EMTs if I could wait to give a statement to the police at the same time as the driver. As it turned out, the driver changed his story and lied to the cops, claiming he had stopped at the stop sign.  The cops wouldn’t take a statement from my family, because they hadn’t been there at the moment of the crash, and by then, the neighbor woman had also left.

About an hour later, by which time my wife had joined me in the ER, the cops came in to to take a statement from me. By then the ER staff had put me through a full body trauma checkup and given me some painkillers. They had also put a stabilizing collar around my neck. I was laying flat on my back, a bit woozy and very uncomfortable laying there with the stiff collar which made it difficult for me to talk. They asked me what happened and I told them the driver hadn’t stopped. They told me he claimed to them that he had stopped, and it was my word against his. Through the haze I became agitated and as forcefully as I could, insisted that what he had told them was not truthful, that he hadn’t stopped, and he’d admitted that to me. I remembered the neighbor woman and they said she wasn’t there when they arrived on the scene. This ended with the cops telling me that if I wanted to, I could go to the 24th Precinct Station House to add to my statement.

The doctors decided I could go home and I was discharged without being admitted to the hospital.

I rested a lot the next few days and called a family friend who is also a lawyer. He agreed to represent me in a claim against the driver and his insurer. When I felt well enough I went to the 24th Precinct with a copy of the incident report and explained that the driver’s claim that he had stopped was false. My contention was duly noted. I added that a witness had also seen the crash, but the police declined when I asked if they would take a statement from her. Their attitude seemed to be a driver and a cyclist are on equal terms, and the latter deserves no special deference from the former, even though they’re operating a machine that weighs many multiples more than the cyclist.

It took well over a month for the deep purple bruises, like the one on my arm shown above, to fade, and my knee was sore for months. I also had an internal problem a month to the day after the incident—I developed a kidney stone—which I thought might have been hastened or precipitated by the car crashing into me as it did, and from the resulting stress on my system. Suffice it to say, I had some health issues in the second half of 2023!

A few weeks after the crash I took my mangled bike—a sturdy Trek I had bought more than forty years ago, just as the fabled Wisconsin bike maker began selling bikes outside their home state—in for service. As is recommended after bike crashes, I also bought a new Bontrager helmet, which has a special “wave cell technology,” that is said to direct impact away from the head. and soon began riding again, albeit very carefully, with a skeptical eye cocked toward all drivers at stop signs and traffic lights. The wheels of compensation grind slowly, and a year later, we haven’t quite completed the process with GEICO. I’ll be relieved when it’s all settled.

Given the driver’s blatant disregard of the stop sign, and then his false denial of that to the NYPD,  I had hoped to see the incident report revised to reflect his violation, but unfortunately that’s not how things turned out. Even without that, I’m hopeful that the claim against his insurer will be apt to raise his cost for continuing coverage, a consequence he should have to endure for his reckless driving that injured me, and could have hurt me much worse than it did. I also hope it will deter him from further reckless driving.

I’ve been riding my bike in New York City since I came here from Cleveland in 1986, and I’m happy I can say I’ve only been in the one collision over all these years. It could’ve been a lot worse, and I hope it’s the only one I’ll ever have.

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Publishers Lunch Spring 2023 Book Buzz Panel—Including Dava Sobel, on Madame Curie and the Women Scientists She Hired and Inspired

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The Book Buzz panel put on by Publishers Lunch last night was terrific. Four great new novels and one science biography, with the authors appearing one after the other in conversation with their editors. The picture to the left shows the lone nonfiction author, Dava Sobel whose upcoming book is The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science. She discussed it with her editor George Gibson of Grove Atlantic. The narrative focuses on the Polish-born two-time Nobel Prize-winner (in Physics and Chemistry) Madame Curie (1867-1934) and the forty-five women scientists whom she mentored and did pioneering research with in her laboratory in Paris.

For the record, the four novels presented were Penitence by Kristin Koval (with editor Deb Futter, Celadon Books); Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell (with editor Olivia Taylor Smith, Simon & Schuster; City of Night Birds by Juhae Kim (with Helen Atsma, Ecco Books); and The Ancients by John Larison (with editor Emily Wunderlich, Viking Press).

Back to Dava Sobel, in 1995 I was at the book launch for what became her international bestseller Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time in a book talk at the South St Seaport Museum bookshop in lower Manhattan. That event was also hosted by George Gibson, then her editor at Walker & Co. I am reminded by the inscription in the copy of the book I bought that night that it was September 22, 1995. That happened to be my 41st birthday, though I don’t recall going that night to celebrate, particularly. 

What a fateful night it was, birthday or not, because I also had the good fortune then to meet Dava Sobel’s aunt, who like me, had come to celebrate the publication of Longitude. This was Ruth Gruber (b. Brooklyn 1911-d. Manhattan 2016), a humanitarian, photojournalist, and foremost chronicler of the DPs (displaced persons) after WWII. With her I would ultimately publish six books, titles like Ahead of My Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2000) and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (Times Books, 1997; Union Square Press, 2008; Ruth’s spot reporting in the postwar period on the real-life Exodus ship was the basis of Otto Preminger’s movie “Exodus”).

Dava’s mother was Ruth’s sister, and had long known of her aunt’s exploits and inspiring work. I commissioned her to write a new Introduction to the first trade paperback edition of Ruth’s 1983 book Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2001). It came out around the time CBS broadcast a two-night miniseries based on the book, with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth’s part. The rest of the cast included Martin Landau, Anne Bancroft, and Hal Holbrooke. The backstory to the book and miniseries was that from 1940-46 Ruth had been a staffer in the FDR administration, and throughout that whole span she served as an official of the Interior Department under President Roosevelt’s longest-tenured cabinet secretary, Harold Ickes. In 1944 Ickes assigned her to undertake a dangerous mission. After first being made a temporary general—so if she was captured, she’d benefit from the rights of the Geneva Convention—she was flown on military aircraft to war-torn southern Italy and then met and screened and escorted one thousand (mostly, but not all, Jewish) refugees on a ship called the USS Henry Gibbins across the Atlantic. They were bound for a safe haven in Oswego, NY, a former army base called Fort Ontario, where they were when WWII ended some months later in ’45.

For readers who want to know more about Ruth Gruber, this link will take you to the approximately half-dozen posts I have published about her on this blog.

I am so glad I met Dava that night in 1995, and her aunt Ruth Gruber, through the always stellar ministrations of George Gibson, a friend in bookselling and publishing for many years.

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