Jeremy Treglown in Conversation

Novelist and critic Heather Beck continues her occasional series of interviews with editors.

HEATHER BECK: Before we discuss your work as editor of The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) it would be interesting to know something about your early development. For example, what was your family like?

JEREMY TREGLOWN: My father was a Methodist minister until I was about thirteen, when he became an Anglican priest. Methodist ministers are peripatetic, so we moved around quite a bit. There was a strong chapel tradition on both sides of the family. The Treglowns were Cornish miners and mining engineers, but my father's mother was the daughter of a minister, Thomas Dickinson, who did a stint as national president of the United Methodist Church. My mother's family, too, were enthusiastic Methodists. They were East London and Essex people - her father was a supervisor at a galvanising works in Blackwall.

My mother worked in a public library as a young woman - very young, that is: she left school at sixteen and was married at eighteen. In 1944, soon after they got engaged, my father, who had become an infantry chaplain, was blown up and blinded. So the Second World War was very much a presence in my sister's and my upbringing. We grew up surrounded by what I suppose would now be called post-traumatic stress syndrome. Our father, who apart from being blinded in the explosion had also lost an arm and suffered perforated ...