A Book of Mediterranean Food

had earned much prestige as a
highbrow publisher his firm was
losing money. The Bristol printers,
Purnell’s, who had subsidized him
and supplied him with paper – still
very short in those days – had told
him they could no longer finance
him. In the course of what must
have been an explosive meeting
one of the Purnell directors had
said, ‘What we need, Mr Lehmann,
is a few rattling good yarns.’ John
had stormed out. Perhaps rightly.
But he had left his authors desolate.
In my case desolation was a firm of
publishers called Macdonald’s, also
owned by Purnell, but financially