The special centenary celebration of The Culture!

One thing I didn’t quite realise when we decided, a couple of years ago, to number each edition of The Culture newsletter is that it would make the 100th edition—this one—feel a little… different. You can’t just send out the usual newsletter when it’s got those three digits in its subject line. You’ve got to somehow mark the occasion.

So mark it we shall. Rather than the usual article and accompanying recommendations from our critics—and as much as I would have loved to have published something about Ozzy Osbourne—we’ve done something a little special this week. But, before I get on to that, I hope you’ll allow an editor some brief reminiscence.

Because when we launched this newsletter, 99 editions ago, I was very clear about what I wanted it to be. It’s there in the tagline above: a guidebook to the literary-artistic world, for our readers, by Prospect’s roving band of brilliant critics. One of the slight problems with commissioning for a monthly magazine like Prospect is that you sometimes feel as though more topical subjects—something that happened yesterday, say—can disappear into the yawning gaps between issues. This newsletter is a way of correcting that. It was my hope that if you were to collect all the editions published in a year, it would tell you practically everything you needed to know about that year in culture. The big things, of course, but also the small things that receive less attention but nevertheless matter.

Have we pulled it off? Of course, there are always subjects that should have been covered, articles that should have been commissioned, but I’m pretty happy overall. What this newsletter has, more than most others of its kind, is breadth—and that’s down to the limitless expertise and open-mindedness of its writers. We’ve covered everything from the popularity of the flute in popular music to the heritage of Paddington, from the significance of Alfred Brendel to the poignancy of Korean new year celebrations. (Reading back through newsletters, as I’ve been doing recently, I have also realised that I so often lower the tone—I’ve written about soap operas and self-help books, among other less edifying topics.)

And that’s just among the articles that lead the newsletters. Breadth and critical brilliance are also on display in the recommendations that follow—by friends and contributors including David McAllister, Kate Maltby, Lucy Scholes, Philip Clark, Laura Barton, Imogen West-Knights, David Barnett, Lucy Hicks Beach, Alex Peake-Tomkinson, Mishka Rushdie Momen and Oliver Soden. My bank account has suffered from their advice, but my cultural horizons never have. In fact, there are few more worthwhile pursuits in the whole world of newslettering, I’d say, than going back and catching up with the books, films, albums and other artworks they’ve recommended.

Which brings me to the special thing I mentioned earlier. Assiduous readers may have noticed that we’ve also been publishing The Culture on the Prospect website for the past few editions, mostly so you’ve got choices for how to read it—from within your inbox, your browser or even on the app. But now, thanks in large part to the hard work of my colleague Chris Tilbury, all the past editions of the newsletter are on the website. So it doesn’t matter if you’ve deleted them from your email account or if, as a late adopter, you never received them in the first place. You can now check out all those articles and cultural recommendations with ease.

To get you started, we’ve linked to ten of the online newsletters below: the very first, along with the 10th, 20th, 30th and so on. Please do take the time to have a click around—and, even better, to forward them on to your friends and other potentially interested parties. Although this newsletter is an exclusive benefit for Prospect subscribers, non-subscribers are still able to read a handful of editions online before coming to what is the only correct decision: handing over some cash to receive all of Prospect’s great journalism.

And, of course, thank you. To all of the newsletter’s contributors and to all its readers, too. If you have comments—or, indeed, cultural recommendations, as I’m keen to start including some from readers—then always feel free to email me on peter.hoskin [at] prospect-magazine.co.uk

Here’s to the next 100.