This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Dear Roley, Giles writes on an ancient laptop whose shift-key function continues to puzzle him, following on from the excellent lunch we so much enjoyed last week I venture to send Tristram’s novel you seemed so interested in.
“Roley” is James Rollington-Smith, publishing director of the old-established firm of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, with whom, ever so many years ago, Giles was at Cambridge.
“Tristram” is a fresh-faced 26 year-old who, 18 months into a brief career on Grub Street, has thus far published three book reviews in the Spectator and whose fledgling work, A Summer’s Dalliance, is a thinly-veiled account of time spent teaching in an EFL college in Taunton.
No one, Giles suspects — not Tristram, not Roley (who, as Giles knows, is on the point of leaving Rosencrantz & Guildenstern for a retirement cottage in Swaledale) and certainly not Treadwell & Glyde, whose senior partner he is — will make any money out of A Summer’s Dalliance.
And yet young people, as he continues to insist, need encouraging. There is also the fact that Tristram’s father is another relic of the dear dead days spent hanging around the King’s Parade coffee shops and giggling over the Dean of Peterhouse’s latest misstep.
This unlooked-for destiny was the work of an uncle, the legendary Mark “Swifty” Treadwell
How did Giles, who conducts his business behind a roll-top desk, get into literary agenting? In fact, this unlooked-for destiny was the work of an uncle, the legendary Mark “Swifty” Treadwell, who, noting his nephew’s inability to settle into the world of stockbroking around the time of Big Bang, gave him a three-month trial.
Unexpectedly, Giles took to the business. He developed a happy knack of acquiring what were known as “carriage trade” titles liable to appeal to the kind of people who shop at Hatchards and John Sandoe. One of these, Major Jasper Trevithick’s With Rod and Gun Through Roxburghshire, was an unexpected bestseller.
On the minus side, he was reputed to have turned down Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch on the grounds that “nobody’s interested in football these days”.
No one quite knows how Treadwell & Glyde have managed to survive the intervening 30 years — no passing fad has ever deflected Giles’s stated aim of cultivating “well-written books for discerning readers” and even now he would be unable to tell you what a “romantasy” was or where you might place a Young Adult novel. The firm’s last appearance on the Booker shortlist was back in 1997.
Still, there remains a handful of commissioning editors prepared to wave Giles’s stable — naval historians, celebrity gardeners and the like — onto their lists.
In Tristram, I can confidently assert, we have the makings of a modern-day Anthony Powell, Giles signs off. Does the publishing world of 2026 need another Anthony Powell? More important than this question, perhaps, is the fact that the lease on Treadwell & Glyde’s elegant Bloomsbury townhouse expires next September.
