Circus of Dreams

Constable 432pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99

In the 1980s, the world of books, which had long been “drab and worthy”, suddenly became “hip”, said Kathryn Hughes in The Sunday Times. This transformation was powered by an exciting new generation of writers – Salman Rushdie, Martin

Amis, Angela Carter – and by a publishing world that became cannier at exploiting new commercial opportunities. Witnessing it all was a young John Walsh, who rapidly rose up the ranks of literary journalism to become books editor of The Sunday Times in 1989.

In Circus of Dreams, he offers an entertainingly gossipy memoir of the period which gleefully mixes “high and low”. Thus we learn that the eminent publisher George Weidenfeld considered himself the “Nijinsky of cunnilingus”, and that when Walsh met the “brilliant academic polymath” George Steiner for lunch, all he wanted to discuss was Andrew Neil’s hair tonic. Walsh tells us that Nigella Lawson – who worked with him at the Sunday Times – once insisted on “climbing onto his lap to show him how to manage his computer”.

Walsh is an attractively enthusiastic chronicler and he can be “very funny”, said Anthony Quinn in The Observer. I “laughed long” at the set-piece lunch with Martin Amis, and at his character sketch of his old boss, Rupert Murdoch. That said, his prose is a bit “try-hard” at times – “Tina Brown hit the journalistic empyrean like a sleek blonde rocket”, he writes – and he’s irritatingly gushy. Walsh is also predictably sniffy about today’s literary scene, said D.J. Taylor in the Literary Review. Sally Rooney is apparently “linguistically unadventurous”; the Booker Prize is highly tedious. Such comments intensify the book’s slightly anachronistic feel. For all the funny anecdotes, there’s no denying that a “belletrist’s autobiography” such as this belongs to a “practically extinct genre”.