David Astor by Jeremy Lewis review – definitive life of a Fleet Street great

A fine biography of the privileged amateur who gave the Observer its journalistic DNA in the postwar era

David Astor was the last of the great English amateurs, that kind of intangible, charming one-off who make this culture and society both fascinating and inexplicable. To his admirers, he was a good man in Fleet Street; to his opponents, he was a sanctimonious, spoilt liberal.

His family were millionaires; Joyce Grenfell a cousin; and his mother, Nancy, an impossible Virginian aristocrat, with whom he fought all his life. David – as his biographer calls him – went to Eton and Oxford, where he became fixated on Nazi Germany, rejecting his parents’ “appeasement”. Later, he flirted with espionage, and inherited the editorship of the Observer, turning a newspaper renowned for John Bull conservatism into a pillar of the progressive postwar settlement. “My view,” he said, “is that the Observer should be run by liberal-minded people both of the left and the right.”

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