Early Life
Lawson was born in 1932 to a wealthy family living at Hampstead. His father, Ralph Lawson (1904–1982), was the owner of a commodity-trading firm in the City of London, while his mother, Joan Elisa Davis, was also from a prosperous family of stockbrokers. His family is Jewish. His paternal-grandfather Gustav Leibson, a merchant from Mitau (now Jelgava in Latvia) changed his name from Leibson to Lawson after becoming a British Citizen in 1911.
Lawson was educated at Westminster School (following in his father's footsteps, also an Old Westminster) and Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a first class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, He carried out his military service as a Royal Navy officer – during which time he commanded a small torpedo boat. Lawson began his career as a financial journalist and progressed to the positions of City editor of The Sunday Telegraph in 1961 and editor of The Spectator (1966–1970).
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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