Sean Rocha

The continuing glory of the New York Review of Books

I once worried for the health of Robert Silvers, longtime editor of the New York Review of Books, because I could not imagine how the replenishing pleasure of reading the NYRB — the cosmopolitan breadth of subjects, the resolute seriousness of purpose, the wittiness of the language — could go on without his guiding hand.  But we are, now, half a year in to reading life without him and, though I never imagined I would say this, the NYRB may be undergoing something of a renaissance under new editor (though longtime contributor) Ian Buruma.  There was Helen Epstein’s revisionist take on the slaughter of Hutus by Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated RPF that contrasts with the generally understood tale of slaughter by Hutus of Tutsis; David Shulman’s lonely struggle to retain his humanist principles in the West Bank; the incredible official history of the Indonesian massacre of ostensibly Communist Chinese in 1965-66 documented, at last, by Jess Melvin; and then, in the kind of esoteric story that makes the NYRB such a delight, a debate about what may be Europe’s oldest folk music in Epirus, in the northwest corner of Greece.

And then there is this by Max Hastings, in a piece entitled “Yesterday’s Parties.”  I care little about Anthony Powell — reading about subjects of which one previously cared little is the principal reason to subscribe to the New York Review of Books — but for a summary of a minor social dispute decades past this can scarcely be bettered:

Powell was a long-serving fiction reviewer for The Daily Telegraph, of which in 1990 I was editor-in-chief. It was apparent that his powers had waned—not unreasonably, since he was an octogenarian. As an admirer I had not the heart to sack him, but he was ill-advised to publish an edition of his collected reviews between hard covers, since most were better forgotten. With difficulty I found a writer willing to notice the “book” favorably in our daily edition.

Unfortunately, I forgot to check who was writing about Powell in The Sunday Telegraph, and only discovered on opening the paper that in a mad moment before departing on holiday, the literary editor had given it to Auberon Waugh [son of Evelyn Waugh]. He treated himself to a feast of contempt at Powell’s expense. Powell took nuclear umbrage, resigned immediately, and rejected my groveling apologies.

How can the future not be bright for a publication prepared to deploy the phrase “nuclear umbrage”?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2018 at 8:00 am. It is filed under Close Reader and tagged with books, New York Review of Books, United Kingdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.