Family values
Dear David,
Thank you for sending me the paper about Prospect. It sounds like you’ve put more thought into it than I did before I started The Modern Review. All I can really say is you should be prepared for your life to become complete hell. The amount of work involved is horrendous—and the anxiety! Your life will be an unending crisis, putting out one fire after another. The chances of the magazine making any money are negligible; the only thing which will keep it going are blood, sweat and tears. I don’t mean to discourage, but I hope you don’t have a family.
Toby Young
Publish and subscribe
Dear Mr Goodhart,
I am glad that you are thinking of producing a new magazine; since Encounter and Horizon, there has been no periodical known to me to make room for serious articles on interesting, contemporary subjects, whether literary or socio-political. I wish your journal well.
I am unlikely to contribute to it, simply because of extreme old age, and the indolence which goes with it—I feel incapable of writing anything new (as opposed to correcting the old). But if you send me an appropriate form, I shall subscribe.
Isaiah Berlin
Unhappy marriage
Dear Mr Goodhart,
I am in sympathy with your plan for a new review. In my experience it is difficult to combine in one magazine both political and creative material because the political is of more immediate concern than the “creative” and therefore tends to drive it out, on the grounds that a short story, poem or memoir can be held over till a later number. Encounter suffered from this so I think it is important to be very clear in your minds as to the balance between the “newsy” and the “eternal.”
Stephen Spender (We received this letter before Sir Stephen died.)
Reader, who are you?
Dear David Goodhart,
Without being patronising in the least, your plan strikes me as being very intelligent, though not necessarily novel. The format and topics, as you would know, can be found quite readily. But who is your audience? The segment of FT which lives in East Anglia? It would be interesting to know.
Daniel Bell
If it ain't broke...
Dear David Goodhart,
I’m surprised you feel the need to “re-invent” the essay. Perhaps it’s just my Anglophilia, but I still think that English journalism is remarkably lucid and intelligent, on average, compared with that in America.
Michael Kinsley
Not so close encounters
Dear Mr Goodhart,
I wish you well. It’s not exactly Son-of-Encounter, but there are “familial resemblances,” and it will certainly fill a gap.
Melvin J. Lasky
Armless fun
Dear Mr Goodhart,
The proposal to establish a serious monthly seems to me absolutely right. Since Encounter folded, there is certainly the most astonishing gap in the market, and it is a scandalous commentary on British culture that no such thing currently exists.
Kenneth Minogue
Angered and excited
Dear David Goodhart,
I drew up a far less professional plan two years ago for a less pompous Nations Review. When I was put on the board of Political Quarterly long ago as the token young man, even before token women, the first board meeting was an heroic row, never so interesting again, between Richard Crossman, who wanted to turn it into a monthly, and Leonard Woolf who wanted Dick out for “conspiring behind our backs”; unhappily Leonard won.
Bernard Crick
Brotherly love
Dear David,
I think your analysis of the market is completely wrong. The business plan is pretty but flawed. Even if you raise all of the money you need you will go bust very quickly. I would not dream of investing in such a venture. But to say that you, David Goodhart, are going to start and run a small business seems to me so improbable, unwise and comic a character as to be really rather funny.
Arthur Goodhart
