
George Weidenfeld, Baron Weidenfeld (13 September 1919-20 January 2016) was a British publisher and member of the House of Lords from 1976 to 2016. Born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family, he fled to London following the Anschluss in 1938 and worked for the BBC as a political commentator during World War II. He became an advisor to President of Israel Chaim Weizmann in 1949 and helped persuade the world that Israel should keep western Jerusalem. In 1948, he cofounded the publishing firm Weidenfeld & Nicolson, publishing the British edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1959. A British citizen since 1947, he was knighted in 1969 for his philanthropy, and he was created a life peer in 1976. He was affiliated with Labour before joining the Social Democratic Party in 1981. He established relationships with Popes, world leaders like Charles de Gaulle and Josip Broz Tito, and even mobster-turned-author Louis Ferrante, whom he persuaded to write a history of the Mafia. He died in 2016.