The London Review of Books was founded in 1979 during a strike at The Times that prevented the publication of the Times Literary Supplement. By the time the dispute at The Times was settled, two issues of the LRB had been published. At the beginning there was only a small circulation. A large proportion of the reviews focused on academic issues. And there was, in the words of its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, both “a leftish point of view” and a certain amount of condescension and even mockery directed at it. The LRB’s archive, which has found a home in the Harry Ransom Center, provided the basis for a history of the LRB’s first four decades.

Sam Kinchin-Smith is Head of Special Projects at the LRB. He compiled the London Review of Books: An Incomplete History (2019) with the support of an HRC fellowship. He is the author of a monograph on Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (2018) and the editor of a catalogue of the political artist Kaya Mar’s work, Naked Ambition (2020).