In 1995 MacLehose led a management buy-out of Harvill and for the following seven years characterised the company as "a bridge across cultures", counting among his authors Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, W. G. Sebald, José Saramago, Georges Perec, Claudio Magris and P. O. Enquist. In 1992 the company was bought by Random House and two years later MacLehose left. He then set up the MacLehose Press, whose motto is "Read the World", as "an independently minded imprint" of Quercus Books (itself founded in 2004). The first titles were published in January 2008, and among these was the best-selling psychological thriller "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Other international authors published by MacLehose Press include Bernardo Atxaga, Dulce Maria Cardoso, Philippe Claudel, Otto de Kat, Maylis de Kerangal, Virginie Despentes, Joël Dicker, Sophie Divry, Per Olov Enquist, Roy Jacobsen, Jaan Kross, Andrey Kurkov, David Lagercrantz, Pierre Lemaitre, Élmer Mendoza, Patrick Modiano, Marie NDiaye, Daniel Pennac, Lydie Salvayre, Żanna Słoniowska, and Valerio Varesi. With "a reputation as a master at finding foreign fiction by writers such as Henning Mankell and Haruki Murakami and turning them into English language hits", MacLehose has said: "When I first came into publishing, there was André Deutsch, Fredric Warburg, Ernest Hecht, Manya Harari, George Weidenfeld – a generation of multilingual people who came to England bringing the assumption that books that had to be translated were no different... You simply published the best you could find and if you had to translate them, you just got on with it." In 2006 MacLehose received the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award for International Publishing. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to the publishing industry in the 2011 New Year Honours. In 2016 he was awarded the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature.