Elly Miller, the last of the great emigré publishers, died on 8 August at the age of ninety-two, leaving behind, apart from a large family, three books she was readying for publication and a host of projects in the offing. The daughter of the legendary Viennese founder of the Phaidon Press, Béla Horovitz, she arrived in this country in 1938 at the age of ten, with not a word of English, but that proved to be no obstacle, and she soon fitted in with the high achievers of Oxford High School for Girls, where she was sent. The story goes that her father, always keen to find books that would be at once popular and learned, asked Ernst Gombrich, a family friend, to write a history of art for Phaidon. When Gombrich handed in the typescript he explained that he had written it to appeal to an intelligent teenager, whereupon Béla promptly turned it over to his sixteen-year-old daughter to read. ‘I loved it,’ she said as she handed the typescript back to him, a sentiment echoed by generations of art lovers ever since. From school she went to Somerville College to read PPE, where her contemporaries included Shirley Williams and Margaret Thatcher, as well as Ken Tynan, with whom she went out for a while. ‘His friends thought me too bourgeois,’ she told me, ‘which I was. But he was great fun.’ After a year of journalistic apprenticeship in New York she returned to join her father’s firm.

When Béla died suddenly in 1955 she and her husband ...