The Quarterly Review was founded in 1809, to act as a counterbalance to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review. The founders included George Canning, the poet Robert Southey and the poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott, and it was published by the celebrated London publisher John Murray. It soon became one of the most important journals of the 19^th Century.

Its first editor was William Gifford, a former seaman and cobbler’s apprentice from Derbyshire. A benefactor paid for Gifford to be released from his apprenticeship and to go to college (he graduated BA from Oxford in 1782). He began to make a name as a satirist, writing a devastating poem called The Baviad aimed at the Della Cruscans, whom he regarded as dangerously sentimental and radical. His reputation secured him the editorship of Canning’s Anti-Jacobin in 1797. Gifford rapidly became the best-known Tory journalist of his day, and the Quarterly Review became highly influential. Gifford also made a highly regarded translation of Juvenal, which is still in print. Later editors included John Gibson Lockhart, whose Life of Scott is widely regarded as one of the classic biographies in English.

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 Keats’s friend 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, John Ruskin and the Italian writer Ugo Foscolo – and many, many more.

The old Quarterly Review ceased publication in 1967, but was revived in 2007, under the aegis of the former Conservative MP and distinguished author, Sir Richard Body, who is Chairman of the Editorial Board. Other members of the Editorial Board include philosophers Antony Flew and Thomas Molnar, ecologist Edward Goldsmith, economist Ezra Mishan and Diana Schumacher. Columnists include legendary socialite Taki Theodoracopulos and ecologist Rev John Papworth. The editor is Derek Turner, the deputy editor is Dr Leslie Jones, and the managing editor is Luise Hemmer Pihl. The art director is Gary Woods. In between issues, Derek Turner and Leslie Jones have a jointly-written blog at quidnunc.quarterly-review.org

The aims of the revived QR are the same as that of its illustrious forebear – to draw upon a wide range of opinions to provide counter-intuitive writing for people who like to think, and to enhance literary, philosophical and political debate.