Miriam Gross, Lady Owen (born 1938) is a British literary editor and writer. [1] [2]
She was the deputy literary editor of The Observer from 1969-81, the women's editor of The Observer from 1981-84, the arts editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1986-91, and the literary editor of The Sunday Telegraph from 1991-2005. [3] [4] [5] [6] She was senior editor (and co-founder) of Standpoint magazine from 2008 to 2011. [7] Writing in The Spectator (6 June 1988), the historian Paul Johnson said that "the beautiful and elegant Miriam Gross is queen of the lit eds."
From 1986-88, she edited Channel Four's Book Choice. [8] She is also the editor of two collections of essays, The World of George Orwell (1971) and The World of Raymond Chandler (1977).
While at The Observer, she conducted a series of interviews, [9] with, among others, the poet Philip Larkin, [10] playwright Harold Pinter, thriller writer John le Carré, painters Francis Bacon and David Hockney, [11] Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, novelist Anthony Powell, philosopher and historian Sir Isaiah Berlin, philosopher A.J. Ayer, and Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Stalin. [12] (The interviews with Larkin, Bacon, Pinter and Powell were republished in her 2012 memoir, An Almost English Life: Literary, and Not so Literary Recollections; the interview with Larkin was republished in Larkin's Required Writing and that with Pinter in Ian Smith, ed., Pinter in the Theatre.)
Gross has contributed to The Spectator, as the magazine's diarist, [13] and has written an occasional column for the Financial Times . [14] She has also served as a judge on the Booker prize [15] and on the George Orwell memorial prize.
As mayor of London, Boris Johnson commissioned Gross to write a policy paper on failing literacy in London schools. [16] [17] She is the author of a memoir, An Almost English Life: Literary, and Not so Literary Recollections. [18] [19] [20]
She was born in Jerusalem in 1938. [21] [22] Her Jewish parents, Kurt May and Vera May (née Feinberg), fled Nazi Germany, [23] but two of her grandparents as well as many other relatives in Germany who did not escape were murdered in the Holocaust. [24] She grew up in Jerusalem, [25] [26] Switzerland and England. She was educated at Dartington Hall School [27] and at Oxford University where she read English literature at St Anne's College. She was married to the literary and theatrical critic John Gross from 1965–1988. [28] The couple had two children, Tom Gross and Susanna Gross. [29] Her son-in-law is author John Preston. [30] Since 1993, she has been married to Sir Geoffrey Owen, the former editor of the Financial Times and daughter of tennis player Violet Owen. [31]
The Spectator is a weekly British newsmagazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest surviving weekly magazine in the world.
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. In 1967, she became an international sensation when she defected to the United States and, in 1978, became a naturalized citizen. From 1984 to 1986, she briefly returned to the Soviet Union and had her Soviet citizenship reinstated. She was Stalin's last surviving child.
Deborah Esther Lipstadt is an American historian and diplomat, best known as author of the books Denying the Holocaust (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005), The Eichmann Trial (2011), and Antisemitism: Here and Now (2019). She has served as the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism since May 3, 2022. Since 1993 she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US.
Paul Bede Johnson was an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he became a popular conservative historian.
Miriam Margolyes is a British-Australian actress. She has gained prominence as a character actor on stage and screen. She received a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her role in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993) and portrayed Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter film series (2002–2011). Margolyes was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2002 New Year Honours for Services to Drama.
The Paris Review is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly.
Panagiotis "Taki" Theodoracopulos is a Greek journalist and writer. He has lived in New York City, London, and Gstaad.
Dominic Ralph Campden Lawson is a British journalist.
Orlando Guy Figes is a British historian and writer. Until his retirement, he was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London.
John Gross FRSL was an eminent English man of letters. A leading intellectual, writer, anthologist, and critic, The Guardian and The Spectator were among several publications to describe Gross as "the best-read man in Britain". The Guardian's obituarist Ion Trewin wrote: "Mr Gross is one good argument for the survival of the species", a comment Gross would have disliked since he was known for his modesty. Charles Moore wrote in The Spectator: "I am left with the irritated sense that he was under-appreciated. He was too clever, too witty, too modest for our age."
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian, television presenter and author of popular history books and novels, including Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003), Jerusalem: The Biography (2011), The Romanovs 1613–1918 (2016), and The World: A Family History of Humanity (2022), among others.
Tom Gross is a British-born journalist, international affairs commentator, and human rights campaigner specializing in the Middle East. Gross was formerly a foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News. He now works as an opinion journalist and has written for both Arab and Israeli newspapers, as well as European and American ones, both liberal and conservative. He also appears as a commentator on the BBC in English, BBC Arabic, and various Middle Eastern and other networks.
Standpoint was a British cultural and political magazine, originally published monthly, that debuted in June 2008. It ceased to be published regularly in 2020, with a final issue coming out in mid 2021.
Daniel Benedict Johnson is a British journalist and author who was the founding editor of Standpoint magazine. Since 2018, he has been founding editor of online journalism platform www.thearticle.com, an associate editor of The Critic magazine and commentator for The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, and The Daily Telegraph.
Kurt May (1896–1992) was director of the United Restitution Organization, which assisted victims of Nazism, from its inception in 1948 to his retirement at age 91, in 1988.
Susanna Gross has been literary editor of The Mail on Sunday since 1999 and bridge columnist for The Spectator since 2000.
Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was the senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and an assistant editor at Penguin. She is series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
Sir Geoffrey Owen is an English academic and journalist. He was formerly editor of the Financial Times and is currently Head of Industrial Policy at the think tank Policy Exchange. He is a Visiting Professor in Practice in the Department of Management, London School of Economics.
Gaby's Deli was a family Jewish restaurant in London's Charing Cross Road. It was named after the founder, Gaby Elyahou, who ran it with his family.
Violet Owen was a British tennis and hockey player. She captained the British hockey team, and played at the Wimbledon tennis championships every year from 1926 to 1933, reaching eighth in the British rankings. She won the women's doubles at the British Hard Court Championships in 1927 partnering Agnes Tuckey. She was a runner-up in singles and doubles at the 1929 German Championships in Hamburg.