PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

“There is no wealth but life” (John Ruskin, Unto This Last)

The Quarterly Review was founded in 1809, to act as a counterbalance to the Whig Edinburgh Review.The founders included George Canning (later a Conservative Prime Minister), Robert Southey (later Poet Laureate) and the novelist Sir Walter Scott, and it was published by the eminent London publisher John Murray. It became one of the 19th century’s most influential journals.

Its first editor was William Gifford, a former seaman and cobbler’s apprentice from Derbyshire. A benefactor paid for Gifford to go to college (he graduated BA from Oxford in 1782). He began to make a name as a satirist, with a devastating poem called The Baviadaimed at the Della Cruscan poets. He was appointed editor of Canning’s Anti-Jacobin in 1797, and rapidly became the best-known Tory polemicist of his day, and a noted translator of Juvenal. A later editor was John Gibson Lockhart, Walter Scott’s son-in-law, whose Life of Scott is widely regarded as one of the great biographies.

The Review launched the career of Jane Austen, and contributor John Wilson Croker penned such a blistering review of John Keats’ Endymion that it was actually blamed for his death – “snuffed out by an article”, as Lord Byron expressed it.

As well as Scott, Southey, Canning, Gifford and Croker, QR contributors included the Duke of Wellington, Lord Salisbury, William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, George Borrow, John Ruskin, Ugo Foscolo, Henry James, John Buchan – and innumerable other cultural and political arbiters.

The Quarterly Review was revived in 2007, under the aegis of former Conservative MP Sir Richard Body, who is Chairman of the Editorial Board.

The present Editor is Derek Turner, the Deputy Editor Dr. Leslie Jones, the American Editor Prof. Mark G. Brennan and the Australian editor Edwin Dyga. Stuart Millson is Classical Music Editor, while Taki and Roy Kerridge both contribute articles.

Each issue contains a mixture of in-depth political essays on all the most important and controversial subjects, written by leading intellectuals and opinion-formers. Our writers have included leading academics and public figures as well as a range of new writers.

• Jillian Becker
• Senator Cory Bernardi
• Sir Richard Body
• Prof. Archie Brown
• Prof. Paul Gottfried
• Prof. Ronald J. Granieri
• Niels Hav
• Prof. Richard Heinberg
• Anton Kannemeyer
• Prof. Patrick Keeney
• Prof. Michael Levin
• Dr. Stoddard Martin
• Ilana Mercer
• Prof. Ezra Mishan
• Horatio Morpurgo
• Prof. Anthony O’Hear
• Prof. Kirby Olson
• Rev. John Papworth
• Rep. Ron Paul
• Tito Perdue
• Prof. Robert Plomin
• Sir Julian Rose
• Prof. Kenneth Royce Moore
• Kirkpatrick Sale
• Catharine Savage Brosman
• Prof. Rupert Sheldrake
• Kazuo Shii
• Ann Stevenson
• The Lord Sudeley
• Rt.  Rev. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury
• Prof. Glenn Wilson

There are also book reviews, features on music, film and classic books, and poetry, plus rare articles from the QR archives.

The aims of the revived QR are the same as that of its famous forebear – to provide counter-intuitive writing for people who like to think.