I have chosen the title of this website with apologies to Norman Mailer, author of Advertisements for Myself and, of course, The Naked and the Dead, which so thrilled me as a 13 year-old in the 1940s.
An unfortunate brush with ‘Cousin Norman’ (a sort-of-cousin by marriage), whose obscenities almost cost me my job, is one among many anecdotes in my memoir, Loose Connections: from Narva Maantee to Great Russell Street, which covers my life as the child of English-Estonian-Jewish parents and my career in the type of London publishing house that no longer exists.
I have strong reservations about ‘advertising’ myself at all but, having written my memoir, it seemed natural to give it an online presence, so I have finally succumbed to the persuasion of friends to start my own blog. I have no idea whether anyone will read my posts, but that is beside the point. I have spent so much of my life acting as a literary midwife to the work of others that, in my ninth decade, it is liberating at last to be able to write exactly what I want, when I want to.