Encounter (magazine) - Journals of Opinion and Precedents

Journals of Opinion and Precedents

The intellectual journal of opinion, it is often said, resembles nothing so much as a pantomime horse, with its front half devoted to analysis of the immediate political developments of the week or fortnight, trimmed more or less to fit a known ideological or partisan agenda – and its “back of the book” of book and arts reviews, held to little such discipline, affording freer range to varied literary and artistic minds to assay finished works of the imagination presumed to sustain an interest outlasting the date of issue. In the Anglo-American context, the weeklies Spectator and the New Statesman, nominally if broadly Tory and Labour, respectively, remain the most prominent such journals in Britain, with both their stateside counterparts, the Nation and the New Republic, on the other hand, said to represent the liberal point of view. A business-then-pleasure division may also mark the more infrequently-issued “little magazine”, as was the case with the American quarterly Partisan Review (1933–2003), whose inaugural decades of greatest fame and distinction were marked by a twin devotion to advanced Marxist or Trotskyist ideals in politics – and in literature to high modernism, whose reigning deities, it was often noted, seldom held such modish commitments, and were indeed often given to everything from Anglo-Catholic royalism to Fascist flirtations to mere political quietism in service to the non-programmatic demands of Art.