This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
“I’m afraid the thing about my family,” Jeremy will sometimes concede in his shy, self-deprecating way, “is that they really do have rather a lot of money.” Even this admission might be thought to understate the case. When the Dowager Countess of Wellbourne dropped dead on the Sovereign’s Lawn at Cowes in the summer of 1982, she was discovered to have left her favourite grandson the small matter of £300,000.
With this the Honourable Jeremy, just down from Cambridge with a degree in modern history, bought a townhouse in Islington and set about realising his long-held dream of founding a small publishing firm called the Liberation Press.
Liberation, shortly renamed Radical Action, began in a small way by issuing a collection of essays by a Marxist don who had taught Jeremy at Trinity and a burlesque cookery primer called “Eat the Rich”. The latter unexpectedly caught on, sold north of 100,000 copies and became a fixture on student bookshelves during the 1980s.
Emboldened, Jeremy convened a series of well-publicised weekly lunches in the basement of the Islington townhouse, dutifully waited on by his wife Marigold, at which members of the shadow cabinet, left-wing vicars and suchlike discussed the issues of the day.
The money from “Eat the Rich” was ploughed into a series of Eastern European translations
All this led to an appearance in the Sunday Times’ “Relative Values’, in which Jeremy was photographed alongside his father, the Earl, in the library of Wellbourne Grange, the paterfamilias in tweeds, his son in a pair of corduroys kept up by baler twine.
All that was three-and-a-half decades ago. Since then Radical Action, later re-christened Freedom Publishing and now trading as Brimstone Books, has remained a lively presence on the alternative publishing scene.
The money from “Eat the Rich” was ploughed into a series of Eastern European translations, most notably the Albanian novelist Yasel Treblinkian’s Sad Days in Tirana, and Jeremy himself was encouraged to write a poignant autobiography — Crust on its Uppers — about how unhappy he was at Eton and the shame he experienced at being made to attend hunt balls.
In his mid-sixties now, with a lot of curly grey locks and an impossibly juvenile air, long divorced from Marigold (now married to an investment banker), Jeremy is still, as he puts it, “trying to show that the fight is far from over”.
If Brimstone Books is, alas, more precariously financed than in the great days when Ken Livingstone dined off bouillabaisse in its basement, then it is still reckoned a feather in one’s cap to be published by them. Are you a young (under 50) writer with a passion for social justice? Well, head to Brimstone Books, where your manuscript will be guaranteed a warm welcome.
Whilst the advance will be nugatory, and many long years will elapse before the book is published — if, in fact, it is published at all — there will at least be solace in the thought that you are dealing with what everyone who has ever come across Jeremy will insist is “a terribly nice man”.
