The Maverick review: The most well connected man in the Western world

The Maverick
by Thomas Harding
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25

W ho — or even what — was George Weidenfeld? At the most basic level he was a publisher, who rose from being a refugee from Vienna to a peerage.

But George Weidenfeld was so much more.

He was, in his public life, a visionary, a one-man diplomatic service, a creator, a fundraiser, a networker (a talent not to be sneezed at), an impresario, an entrepreneur, a facilitator and much else besides. And he was, above all else, a Jew.

Weidenfeld, who died in 2016, was perhaps the most well-connected man in the Western world, whose calls to politicians, thinkers, business leaders and philanthropists — even popes — would always be taken.

The strength of Thomas Harding’s biography is the context it provides. It is not a conventional biography; it is not, for a start, chronological. And it misses out and underplays long periods of Weidenfeld’s life.

His time as Chaim Weizmann’s chief of staff, for example, is covered in less than a paragraph.

But by structuring the book as a series of chapters telling the stories behind Weidenfeld’s publication of various key books, and then diverting within those stories to other aspects of his life — ignoring chronology to explore what made Weidenfeld tick, what he was interested in and what he was doing — The Maverick well reflects Weidenfeld himself, who was never at any time focused on just one thing.

Most importantly, Harding, who never met his subject, understands and conveys well the most important thing of all about Weidenfeld. He was driven by the need for success, yes.

But he saw his success — indeed his life — as being in the service of Israel and the Jewish people.

So much of what he did was about ensuring Israel’s safety. Harding details, for example, the story of how the original draft of Max Hasting’s biography of Entebbe hero Yoni Netanyahu was bowdlerised at the request of various senior Israelis (and the Netanyahu family) and how Weidenfeld betrayed his own principles in doing so. Yet he had been the publisher who took on all comers to publish Lolita, and who would always battle for his authors when authority tried to intervene.