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Martin Schneider writes:
Happened to stumble upon Andrew Orlowski's paean to Wired, in which he writes in passing, "In Britain we've never had the equivalent of a Harper's or a New Yorker—something with a cracking 15,000-word article that you can read in the bath." Is that true? What's the closest periodical—glossy or otherwise—that can deliver such an Anglo-aquatic reading experience? The London Review of Books, perhaps? Any others?
Comments
My LRBs do pile up in the way that others speak of their New Yorkers…
Lee Siegel, in a recent NYT piece on George Steiner, paired the TLS with the New Yorker as ‘equally bourgeois’ - perhaps literally true, but to me a poor description of the TLS’s flavor.
In my college days of radical Anglophilia, I subscribed to the New Statesman, The Spectator and Private Eye, if not more things.
Wouldn’t Punch have been the equivalent, if it were still around, that is?
There was a very famous magazine based in London that was modeled on The New Yorker: Night and Day, whose contributors included Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, Alistair Cooke, V. S. Pritchett, John Betjeman, and whose film reviewer was Graham Greene. It was Greene’s cheeky review of Shirley Temple that—well, that story’s been told a zillion times.
A wonderful fascimile anthology of Night and Day was published in 1985.
Incidentally, the telephone receptionists at the magazine soon lost patience saying, “Night and Day” when they answered, only to hear the inevitable response, “…you are the one.”
In the UK, the major magazines are the two big current-affairs weeklies, namely the New Statesman (centre-left) and the Spectator (centre-right). There are the literary journals, The Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books. Then there are the monthly current affairs/ideas magazines, Prospect and the newish Standpoint Magazine. There is also the quarterly Granta (containing fiction, poetry and a smattering of reportage) and then Intelligent Life, an offshoot of the Economist, which combines essays, comment and profiles with adverts for expensive things.
The only place you will find essays of 15,000+ is really the LRB, but even then it is only occasionally. There was also a very long piece published in Granta late last year, an extensive and comprehensive essay entitled the Rise of British Jihad, however this was more an exception rather than the rule.
The closest equivalent to the New Yorker is respect of essay content and coverage is perhaps the weekly magazines that come with the weekend newspapers. Indeed, the Guardian and Observer Magazines often republish pieces from the New Yorker, albeit (I think) in expedited forms. But I think its important to say that even if the feature was as long as one in the New Yorker, it’s doubtful that the magazine - or any UK magazine, sadly - would devote the space to an in-depth profile of, say, the British equivalent of Roland Burris, or something detailing the history of tinnitus.
I think Prospect is pretty close to Harper’s.