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“... have made much of the hypocritical discrepancies between public eminence and private person. J.E. Morpurgo has settled for ‘paradox’. His biography-cum-house-history evokes a constant sense of how odd it was that such a man should have produced such a thing. According to this account, Allen Lane was a monstrously paradoxical man: not ...”

“... of books. The story is told with verve and enlivening malice (most of it for his predecessor J.E. Morpurgo, whose 1979 biography, Allen Lane: King Penguin, stinks in Lewis’s nostrils). Particularly gripping is Lewis’s account of the turbulence left by Maschler’s departure in June 1960. In his letter of resignation to Lane, Maschler recommended his ...”

“... living on ‘this desperate edge of now’, or the mercurial evanescence of a Jim Clark or a Joe Orton, counts for little in the scales of achievement when weighed against such elephantine stamina and titanic endurance. This book is, unashamedly, perhaps inevitably, a monument to the loneliness of the long-distance runner, rather than a paean of praise ...”

“... a moribund list and in doing so doubled their turnover.’ You would never guess this from J.E. Morpurgo’s biography of Allen Lane. He allows Godwin less than twenty pages out of almost four hundred and several of those twenty are devoted to a palace revolution Godwin is supposed to have plotted to depose the King Penguin. According to a letter to the ...”