Remembering Susanna Gross, journalist and friend - The Jewish Chronicle

Susanna Gross was a literary editor and woman of letters. She was a supreme bridge commentator and player and she had a special gift for friendship. Her friends were many and varied and she was broadly beloved.

She was distinguished not just by her talent and her roles as editor, columnist and bridge champion, but also by her very witty, somewhat fey, often mischievous, always neurotic and playful charm and exuberant joie de vivre that makes the news of her death seem not only unthinkable and heartbreaking – but unlikely. Yet she has just died at 58 of a cancer that she treated for much of the time with a sort of heedless, absent-minded and dismissive disdain – the way she would a clumsy and tiresome bridge-player whom she was stuck with for an evening. Her stoicism was especially surprising given she was an enthusiastic and unapologetic hypochondriac all her life.

As the bridge columnist of The Spectator she was acute, funny and profoundly respected; as a player she was notoriously shrewd, apparently genial but fiercely competitive. High spirited and always original, she became the ruling queen of the international bridge circuit, befriending and relishing that strange milieu of the genteel, the clever, the piratical, the wicked and the mysterious.

Sophisticated and always smiling, she was strong-minded and outspoken: in one of her columns she was fondly nonplussed when the future prime minister David Cameron was distracted from the game by his then girlfriend, Sam. Susanna won national and international competitions and represented England in the Lady Milne Trophy, winning four times. When Boris Johnson became Spectator editor, he was tempted to listen to those who questioned the credentials of this young female bridge columnist. “How could anyone so young and so funny know anything about this fiendishly difficult game?” asked the future prime minister in the obituary he wrote for The Spectator. But he soon realised she “knew far more of the game than any of her rivals and played better” so she remained the columnist for the next 20 years, writing with “charm and genius” which she possessed “in spades or trumps or both”.

The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove, who played bridge with her and also wrote an obituary, noted that her columns were so good because of her “unerring eye both for opponents’ weaknesses and for quirks of character that illuminate the human condition”. Indeed, she was both childlike in her joyfulness and sophisticated in her worldliness, something of a bohemian. I sometimes thought she belonged in a Leonard Cohen song, a Klimt painting or a novella of Zweig or Schnitzler – as at home in the mansions of grandees as she was in the obscure cafés of distant cities. She had another genius for friendship. Affectionate and loyal, her circle including a lifetime of devoted friends but also a phalanx of film stars, comedians, prime ministers, writers, TV presenters and professional card players.

She was born in 1967 into a literary, secular and urbane Jewish family; her erudite father, John Gross, was the doyen of literary critics and editor of The Times Literary Supplement, and her mother, Miriam née May, was the glamorous daughter of a German lawyer, who emigrated to Jerusalem where they lived for many years and was for a long time literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

Susanna was brought up in a household where an almost pre-First World War Viennese sophistication reigned, where books were regarded reverently and where literary stars, including Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser, were regular visitors. Pinter and Fraser later became Susanna’s bridge-playing friends.

After Godolphin and Latymer School, she read philosophy at York University where she discovered her talent for and joy in bridge, which became a lifelong passion. Afterwards she naturally gravitated into the world of letters starting as the Daily Mail’s obituary editor, then Harpers & Queen’s features editor, The Week’s deputy editor and finally for many years the literary editor of The Mail on Sunday: She teased her mother that she might steal some of her reviewers from the Sunday Telegraph.

Susanna, with her originality, wit, her twinkling gaze, raffish smile and gold-red hair, was strikingly charismatic and much admired. In 2005 she married the writer John Preston, whose successes with The Dig and A Very English Scandal, which were both adapted for screen, made her very proud, though she joked she had “married out” since he was not a bridge player. Together they had two children, Joseph and Milly, and she was always very family-minded, close to both her late father and her mother (who survives her) and her brother, Tom, the influential international affairs commentator. She kept writing her Spectator column even when she was very ill and retained her looks, charisma and playfulness even at a birthday party just weeks before she died. Susanna was a person of enthusiasms that included family, children and friends, books, bridge, blackjack and the comedy of life itself. She was one of my dearest friends for 35 years, and whether sitting for hours in cafés or walking in the park for long conversations on matters high and low, but never medium, I adored her, and though the world seems unimaginable without that pealing laugh, I celebrate her life – and how lucky I was to know her.

Susanna Gross: born July 31, 1967. Died November 11, 2025

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