Last modified on Thu 11 Feb 2021 15.15 EST
The life of Naim Attallah, who has died aged 89, might have come from the pages of Balzac: he went from currency dealer to company director, racehorse-owner, film and theatre impresario, publisher, magazine proprietor, parfumier, chocolate-maker and – perhaps most importantly and controversially – author.
In the early 1970s, he fell in with John Asprey, heir to the luxury goods group, and under his patronage became joint managing director and eventually group chief executive, expanding the company greatly. On the way up Attallah acquired, independently, Quartet Books (1976), The Women’s Press (1977) and several magazines, including the Wire, the Oldie and the Literary Review, the last of which lost him, over time, an estimated £2.5m.
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
1. The McMahon-Hussain Correspondence To properly understand the events that led to the creation of both Israel and Saudi Arabia, we must travel back to the early 1900s’ Middle East. At the outbreak of WWI in the region, Sir Henry McMahon, then British High Commissioner in Egypt, offered Hussain bin Ali, Sharif of Hijaz (or ruler of the Hijaz – the western Arabian region in which Mecca and Medina lie), an independent Arab state if he would help the British fight against the Ottoman Empire. Hussein’s interest in throwing off his Turkish overlords converged with Britain’s war aim of defeating the Ottomans. McMahon made this offer via a series of letters exchanged between him and Sharif Hussain, collectively known as the McMahon-Hussain Correspondence. On his 14 July 1915 letter to McMahon, Hussain stated, among other things, the following as one of his propositions: