George Weidenfeld, born into a Jewish family in Vienna, in 1919, fled to England in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime, and then began a career in publishing that would make him one of the most influential figures in the industry. During his long and illustrious career he championed some of the most important voices of the twentieth century, from Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow to Harold Wilson, Isaiah Berlin and Henry Kissinger.

Weidenfeld was the world’s best networker, the publisher’s publisher and a great intellectual. His lifelong effort to be the world’s most famous host a cover for his desperate loneliness.  How did he rise so successfully within the ranks of London and New York society. Providing a full, unvarnished and at times difficult history of this complex man, this first biography of a titan of culture is also a story of resilience, determination, and the power of ideas to shape history.

In 1950s George Weidenfeld decided to publish a learned work of  diplomatic history by an unknown German-American émigré, which sold about 500 copies. No Matter: A World Restored by Henry Kissinger suppled an early sign of what Thomas Harding calls the publisher’s remarkable perspicacity”.

This forged a lasting friendship between the Vienna-born Jewish refugee who had arrived in London , almost penniless, in 1938, and future diplomatic titan, who now aged 100 – given this book a jacket puff.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson has over 75 years conspicuously fronted works written by the great and good and occasionally the notorious: Vladimir Nabokov to Albert Speer, Benito Mussolini to Keith Richards, Saul Bellow to Malala Yousafzal.

Saint or Sinners  found a welcoming home between W&N covers. As German journalist-turned media titan Matthias Dopfner who became a kind of surrogate son to the elderly publisher, put it, “ George was the opposite of cancel culture”.

His original partner, writer and Tory MP Nigel Nicolson, added resources and connections but soon took a back seat, Until his death, aged 96, in 2016, Arthur George Weidenfeld first ran the show then, after he had sold his innovative but erratically funded company in 1991, resigned as mentor-figure head, first knighted then ennobled. He had lost two grandmothers to the Holocaust, his parents barely escape, he brought to hidebound London publishing . Charmer, networker, fixer and world class bridge builder, Weidenfeld acquired an aura as hero, ogre. Harding offers not a mass trawl of Weidenfeld’s thousands of titles but selected episodes framed by 19 landmark books, from Nabokov’s censorship-busting Lolita, to Antonia Fraser’s best selling Mary, Queen of Scots, and the 2mn memoir Mick Jagger never delivered, truly, a saga of squeezing blood out of stone.

The book contains gushing eulogies and snarling indictments.

Some women responded to his courtship of the young and beautiful by appreciating the seducer’s charm and intellect, others fled from his creepy attention.

Allies salute the tireless book-inventor’s never-ending energy and stamina. Bruised rivals who loved the “flashy and the bogus” Max Hastings wrote of a “Loathsome human being”.

Weidenfeld longed and worked for reunion with the German-speaking world and on many fronts he achieved it.

The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing by Thomas Harding, Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25, 336 pages.