Having edited British GQ for 22 years, when I left in 2021, as the operation became centralised in New York, my agent at Curtis Brown told me to write a memoir about my time there. Having zero interest in doing so, I said I would rather concentrate on other things (principally, an extremely long holiday with my family). But as he is a very good agent, he pestered me until I said yes, which turned out to be an extremely fortuitous decision.
Because my book — which was extremely flattering about the company which employed me for two decades — didn’t just act as a curtain call to my Condé Nast adventure, it seemed to coincide with a massive recalibration of the publishing industry. I wasn’t alone, as last year the exalted Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter published his own memoirs, adding lustre to the suggestion of a closing chapter.
