The humour of self-deprecation is peculiarly English. Few people do it better than Jeremy Lewis. His first two autobiographical volumes Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits are being reissued in Faber Finds to coincide happily with his third volume Grub Street Irregular being published by HarperCollins.The second volume of Jeremy Lewis's wonderfully entertaining autobiography sees him starting out, with a mixture of diffidence and self-professed incompetence, on a career in publishing. Along the way we see him tucking into cod and chips with Jane and Geoffrey Grigson, drinking tea with Kingsley Amis and retsina with Patrick Leigh-Fermor. When reviewing this book, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson called it 'The funniest book I have ever read about publishing...this is not merely a hugely entertaining book, but an important one'. That judgment still stands.