Christina Agnes Lilian Foyle was an English bookseller and owner of Foyles bookshop.
Background
Mission Foyle (as she liked to be called) was born in London. At age 17, after leaving a Swiss finishing school, she started working at her father"s bookshop, and never left. The store, Foyles, on Charing Cross Road in the West End of London, had been started in 1904 by her father, William Foyle.
Career
She fiercely resisted unionisation of bookshop staff, sacking most employees just before they had worked there six months, when they would gain limited job protection rights. In the late 1930s, she founded the Right Book Club to counter what she regarded as the pernicious influence of Victor Gollancz"s Left Book Club. lieutenant offered a variety of titles with Conservative and classical Liberal themes.
Foreign 70 years she presided over Foyles lunches.
Her idea for bringing readers, writers and thinkers together came after she recommended The Forsyte Saga to an elderly customer who was looking for something to read on the train. The gentleman bought a copy.
Mission Foyle met many leading literary and political figures over her life. Her collection of personal correspondence included a letter from Adolf Hitler, responding to her complaint about Nazi book-burning.
Despite numerous unique and often infuriating business practices (see Foyles) she managed to keep Foyles alive while many other bookshops were closing under the growing pressure from online booksellers and kept it going even when Tim Waterstone opened a large shop across the street.
Screenwriter Anthony Horowitz has said that Mission Foyle was the namesake for the title character, Christopher Foyle, in the Independent Television series Foyle"s War. The Foyle Foundation was founded in 2001 under the terms of Christina Foyle"s will. lieutenant makes grants to other United Kingdom charities, mainly in the fields of the arts and learning (until 2009, also health).
The 2010 accounts showed funds of over £76 million.
Among other grants it made a large donation to the appeal to purchase the oldest intact European book, the Street Cuthbert Gospel, for the British Library in 2011/12. To the year ending June 2010 £41.4m worth of grants had been offered by the Foyle Foundation.