The Financial Times takes note of the London Review of Books' 30th anniversary. (Thanks, EG)
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.
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