Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, who has died aged 85, launched his publishing firm with one of the boldest gambles of a short-lived British literary era marked by high hopes, big money and gossip-fuelled ebullience.
In 1990, the former managing director of Hamish Hamilton inaugurated his own imprint, Sinclair-Stevenson, with a huge, unorthodox biography of Charles Dickens by the writer Peter Ackroyd. Sinclair-Stevenson had paid around £650,000 for that book and its planned successor (a life of William Blake), although the feverish chatter of the times placed the figure at £1m.
