Naim Attallah, the Eighties literary It girl set, and me
His approach may have been ‘gloriously’ non-PC, but Anna Pasternak adored working for the Quartet Books chairman
Anna Pasternak worked for Naim Attallah at Quartet Books in the 1980s
When I heard that Naim Attallah had died last week, I felt as if a vital pop of literary colour had left our drab world. The flamboyant Palestinian proprietor of Quartet Books was a character so vivid that his exotic existence now seems the stuff of fiction. The entrepreneur who financed
The Literary Review and
The Oldie magazine, made a society splash in the 1980s throwing the most dazzling parties in London, employing only aristocratic beauties or girls with famous literary surnames. ‘Attallah’s harem’ as it was known, would not pass muster with HR today. He created a wave of literary It girls, including Nigella Lawson, Rebecca Fraser, Sophia Sackville-West, Daisy Waugh, Emma Soames, Candida Crewe, Jubby Ingrams, Virginia Bon