Covers from the London Review of Books’ 30-year history

On Thursday, when the London Review of Books – “the most extraordinary journal of its time” (Tom Paulin), “the house magazine of the intellectual elite” (Clive James), and “the largest literary magazine in Europe” (the LRB’s own boast) – celebrates its 30th birthday, glasses should, perhaps, be raised in a toast to Reg Brady. For it was action by Brady’s trade union, Natsopa, which forced the closure of Times newspapers from December 1978 to November 1979.

In the postwar period, The Times, the Times Educational Supplement, the Times Literary Supplement, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and The Sunday Times dominated literary reviewing. So when The Times’s presses stopped rolling for a whole year (perhaps forever, some feared), a tempting vacancy in literary journalism opened. A small crop of magazines sprang up to fill the gap, chief among them the London Review of Books.

The initial idea, finance, and title came from The New York Review of Books, itself founded during The New York Times printing strike of 1963. And, for its first six months, issues of the LRB were folded, “marsupially”, as the joke went, inside imported copies of the NYRB. The British pages were under the control of Karl Miller, a Cambridge-educated Scot in his mid-40s who had previously edited the literary pages of The Spectator, the New Statesman, and The Listener (of which he was editor-in-chief). Nothing was more important to him than the quality of the reviews he commissioned and toothcombingly revised. “When you delivered the copy,” Philip Larkin once wearily recalled, “he would ring you up no matter where you were. I was once hauled out of a conference in Aberystwyth, to go through it, Leavis-wise.” The fearsome FR Leavis, the academic and literary critic, had been Miller’s mentor at Cambridge. Leavis despised literary London. Miller’s mission was to make it conform to Leavisian standards.

The first issue of the magazine

In 1974, after Miller had left The Listener (over a disagreement of principle), Noel Annan – then provost of University College London (and a reviewer for Miller) – invited him to apply for the Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature at UCL. This despite the fact that Miller had no higher degrees and had never before taught in a university. Annan believed someone such as Miller who dealt with the finest minds of his time should not be ruled out of court because he hadn’t published some piddling articles in Neophilologus, or whatever.

I was a junior lecturer in the department that Miller took over. The academic chair, he confided, was not entirely comfortable to his journalistic haunches – he was restless, he said, for proofs, not undergraduate essays, to mark. In 1979, he got his wish. He was invited by the NYRB to edit the newly devised LRB while continuing to occupy his post at UCL. Hard work never frightened Karl Miller.

The first issue of the LRB with Miller’s name on the masthead as editor and Mary-Kay Wilmers as deputy editor (as she had been on The Listener) appeared, dated October 25 1979, with a lead article by John Bayley on William Golding’s Darkness Visible. I, to my glee, featured on the second page – having been commissioned by Miller to write a letter of salutation.

The “marsupial” arrangement with the NYRB did not last. Miller was not a man to be contained in another’s pouch. Wilmers, who was privately wealthy, took over as proprietor. She later became co-editor of the LRB alongside Miller and, since 1992, has been the paper’s sole editor. From the start the Miller/Wilmers doctrine differed from that of the TLS, which aimed to “notice” all that was newly published and worthy of note. The LRB front cover logo was “THE LONDON REVIEW of Books” – the last two words being smaller. As the typography signalled, it was the review that mattered as much as the book under review. Articles in the LRB were, and are, long: anything between 2,000 and 5,000 words. On special occasions they can run into the tens of thousands. Rates of pay seemed to me startlingly high: three or four times, in the early years at least, what the TLS paid. Miller personally appeared austerely indifferent to money. I suspect he worked for little or nothing. Nor did rises or falls in circulation appear to trouble him overmuch. Quality was all.

In return for the generous stipend, loyalty was expected. Miller brought with him a retinue of distinguished writers who had reviewed for him for years, and he could be harsh on what he perceived as disloyalty. On one occasion I wrote something for the other paper only to be glared at with a comment delivered in that bloodcurdling Scottish growl: “I’m told you’ve been whoring at the TLS.” He would not, of course, have read it.

Mary-Kay Wilmers

Wilmers is milder in manner than Miller. “Mysterious” is a word that comes up in description of her. Her closest literary friend, Alan Bennett, says: “There is much that is unsung in Mary-Kay’s life, by her own choosing, which makes her difficult to praise.” All agree, however, that she is as demanding as Miller ever was. The underlying aim has been to forge a collective character for the paper, based on a community of contributing minds, under a presiding editorial discipline. Nicholas Spice, the paper’s long-serving publisher, puts it well: “The people who write for the LRB are not unlike actors or musicians ... editing the LRB has a lot in common with conducting an orchestra. The conductor is nothing without his musicians and the editor nothing without her writers.”

Careers have been made, or materially boosted, by such orchestral association. Among others one could cite John Lanchester, Andrew O’Hagan, Jenny Diski, Hilary Mantel (this year’s Man-Booker winner), and Blake Morrison. From its earliest days, the LRB has also been a nursery for creative writing. Alan Hollinghurst, Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Craig Raine were all prominently featured, as reviewers and with a platform for their works in progress. This was at periods of their careers when their heads of hair were luxuriant and their big literary prizes still to be won.

I suspect Miller wrote no more than a dozen pieces over his 13 years. Wilmers, also a gifted writer, is similarly reticent (her first book, a family history, is published this month by Faber. She will become a hardcover author at 71). I shall see it as a sign of the apocalypse if, like the more flamboyant Peter Stothard at the TLS, she starts blogging.

The paper is not known for a consistent party political line. For a while in the 1980s, it seemed to lean towards the newly formed Social Democratic party. At the same period, the maverick Cambridge economist Wynne Godley ran a series of articles demolishing the economic fallacies of the Tory government. And riffling through the journal in its first decade, one can see, in embryonic form, the shape of the future; our present. In January 1988, in the deep gloom of Labour’s recent shattering defeat, Bryan Gould, the New Zealand-born politician who contested the party leadership with Neil Kinnock, laid down a principle of what later became New Labour: “We must convince the electorate that we know what we are doing in economic policy.” Not all members of the party agreed. In February 1989, a lead article, “Thatcherism”, by the then little-known shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, scathingly denounced the Tory leader’s belief that “things are best left to the market”.

Miller and Wilmers have also been prone to a touch of mischief. When in 1982 the poet and critic Al Alvarez wrote a book on divorce, they commissioned the author’s first wife to review it. A terrific fuss ensued (Frank Kermode, the paper’s longest serving contributor and a friend of the Alvarezes, took particular exception). In 1995, Wilmers commissioned Terry Castle to write a piece headlined, “Was Jane Austen gay?” Most of the disgusted Austenites who wrote in protest to the paper did not pick up that the offending “Terry” was a gay woman.

Circulation of the LRB in the 1980s was little helped by the paper’s physical appearance. It specialised in grim frontal photographs. One, full frontal in a sense, portrayed a sooty-faced coalminer in the post-shift shower, the only pale thing visible his dangling membrum virile. The LRB’s typography was similarly functional but the packaging, and the cramped narrow columns, did not detract from the fine writing. If anything, it added to an aura of high seriousness. The LRB disdained glamour.

In its early years the journal was produced, essentially, by three editorial staff (Milller, Wilmers, and Susannah Clapp, now drama critic of The Observer), who laboured in a series of tiny offices around Bloomsbury. The offices, none the less, pulsated with creative tension, which eventually reached an uncreative pitch in October 1992, when Miller resigned.

In the immediate aftermath of Wilmers’ accession to sole editorship, the contents did not much change. The paper moved to larger, more expansive quarters in Little Russell Street. Peter Campbell’s watercolour designs for the cover began appearing in 1993 and are now the paper’s hallmark. Nicholas Spice managed to bump the advertising revenue up as American academic presses belatedly realised the advantage of being associated with the journal. The classified advertisements at the back of the paper became one of the more entertaining sections.

The old guard were joined by new voices such as the novelist Colm Tóibín, the cultural historian Stefan Collini, the critic James Wood, the historian Linda Colley, and the academic Jacqueline Rose. Paul Foot, until his premature death in 2004, wrote fighting pieces from the left. Further, even, to Foot’s left was Tariq Ali. The American neoconservative commentator Edward Luttwak thundered from the right. Alan Bennett, who has been with the paper since its early days, is under Wilmers’ regime, its star contributor.

Wilmers has a quieter editorial style than her predecessor. Whereas with Miller you would be told on the spot, bluntly, that your piece was no good, with her the bad news comes in the form of months of silence. When I once phoned her about some doomed submission, she sighed, sympathetically, “I’m afraid we feel its time has passed.”

Although it has a corps of American writers, the LRB makes relatively little headway in the US, any more than its distant parent, the NYRB, is widely read in the UK. The LRB line on Israel is partly responsible. Huge exception was taken to a 1988 cover photograph of a soldier clubbing a frail Palestinian woman (it accompanied a fierce piece inside by Robert Fisk). In March 2006, a whole issue was given over to “The Israel Lobby”, an article by the American social scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, which argued that American foreign policy had been hijacked, not a universally popular view in the US. Even less well received had been the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard’s comment, in the week after 9/11, that when the shock had faded, many people (not necessarily herself) might think the US “had it coming”. Protest from affronted Americans filled the correspondence columns for weeks. The editorial response never varies: the LRB does not publish to please.

Thirty years on, what lies ahead? Her colleagues celebrated Wilmers’ 70th birthday a few months ago with a Festschrift (celebratory publication). Many of the contributions concurred, with Kermode, that “her name is, and always will be, associated with the LRB, that it is as if they were joined together by rhyme”. Which raises the uncomfortable question, what will happen to the paper should Wilmers retire? It has had a continuous line of editorship since its founding. In the same period, the TLS has had five editors, all with different styles. There is no obvious editorial heir at LRB. Of course, one hopes the magazine’s robust health continues: were it to go, it would leave a huge vacancy – an equivalent of a pre-frontal lobotomy for the nation. So, on its 30th birthday, many happy returns LRB. And thank you, Reg Brady.

Annual subscription to the LRB costs £63.72 (UK), $42 (US). ‘Writing Family History’, an LRB event with editor Mary-Kay Wilmers and others, is at the LRB Bookshop, London WC1, on November 16. For more information, visit www.lrb.co.uk

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The love songs of LRB Prufrocks

In 1998 the London Review of Books decided to introduce “personals” on the last pages of the paper. Perhaps Mary-Kay Wilmers and her staff thought that readers would use the classifieds to advertise first editions of Jacques Derrida. Charges were moderate: 70p a word, £5 a box number.

LRB’s Bloomsbury shop

What happened, instead, was that the LRB’s classifieds became known for the expression of eccentric but articulate longings, some of them extremely odd (eg “Tell me your kidney-stone experiences: I’ll set them to music”); others worryingly direct (“Woman, 32, needful of the finer things in life seeks stinking rich bloke, 80 to 100.”).

Over the years, the ads have become cleverer and more outrageous: half Hustler, half Times crossword puzzle and very un-LRB. The column became a loved institution and a nice earner for the magazine. I would often turn to them for entertainment but thenI noticed that, somehow,I had become part of an erotic lexicon.

It began innocuously. In October 1999, an ad read: “East Midlands male, 43, reads John Sutherland first. Seeks female for vital redirection. Interested?” I was flattered. A couple of months later came: “Loyal reader of the LRB (female, 40s). Likes Alan Bennett and John Sutherland. Seeks similar male for intelligent evenings down the pub.” It was all very gratifying. But then the JS image went distinctly kinky.

In April 2001 came this erotic gobbledygook: “Mr Loverman. Shabba Ranks of the English concourse. Terry Eagleton is my gold tooth, John Sutherland my spandex pants. Come join me in my Essex ghetto for hot nights of suburban lurve. Bring your own Reeboks/Craig Raine anthologies. Bitchin.”

It got worse. In December 2001, this ad ran: “Enigmatic-looking woman – imagine John Sutherland in a bra ... Please help.” I contacted the LRB’s editor who said that if I wanted to reply it would cost me 70p a word, £5 a box. I thought I heard a chortle in the background.

A few weeks on there was another one, opening: “If John Sutherland were a soul disco diva, would he sing Barry White?” That was interesting, if unexpected.

It was followed by the even odder: “The footballing genius of John Sutherland, the academic prowess of Wayne Rooney: if you think I’m screwed up, you should see my wardrobe.”

When, in 2007, my name stopped appearing in the column, I was initially relieved. But now I find I rather miss my classified stalkers.

An anthology of LRB personals can be found in ‘They Call me Naughty Lola’ (Profile Books), edited bv David Rose