Thirty Secret Years

Robin Denniston has been a publisher all his working life. Starting as a trainee in Collins's Glasgow factory in 1950, he moved to work as an editor in their London office until 1958 when after a short period in a small religious press he joined Hodder and Stoughton as promotion manager, rising to become editorial and then managing director there. In 1974 he left Hodders to become Deputy Chairman of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and 18 months later he was headhunted by the Thomson group to take charge of their book publishing activities - Nelson, Michael Joseph, Hamish Hamilton, Rainbird and Sphere paperbacks. He left Thomson in 1978, the year of his ordination as deacon in the church of England, to become academic publisher at Oxford University Press, additionally taking charge of the general and reference division which published the Oxford dictionaries. He retired in 1989