The Anschluss led to him fleeing Austria because he was Jewish, and in 1939, he settled in Britain,[1] where he worked as floor manager at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
[2] When Hungary entered the Second World War on the side of the Germans in 1941, Deutsch was interned for some weeks as an "enemy alien".
[3] After the war Deutsch founded his first company, Allan Wingate, but after a few years was forced out by one of his directors, Anthony Gibb.
[4] His small but influential publishing house was active until the 1990s, and included books by Jack Kerouac, Wole Soyinka, Earl Lovelace, Norman Mailer, George Mikes, V. S. Naipaul, Ogden Nash, Eric Williams, Andrew Robinson, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Charles Gidley Wheeler, Helene Hanff, Peter Benchley, Leon Uris, Molly Keane, Michael Rosen, Quentin Blake, John Cunliffe, and Ludwig Bemelmans.
[5] Deutsch employed dedicated editor Diana Athill, who in 1952 was a founding director of the publishing company that was given his name (and who in her memoir Stet described him as "possibly the most difficult man in London").