The Salisbury Review may be the most intelligent quarterly review there is. The founding editor was Sir Roger Scruton no less, and he served unpaid for 18 years. Though he retired from the editorship in 2006, the Review has continued, with its insightful look at society and the world. It is a courageous look too, as most magazines would fear to publish what the Salisbury Review will.
All those of influence should subscribe to the Salisbury Review, even if they do not agree with even half the articles contained.
The magazine is named after the Third Marquess of Salisbury, one of the greatest of Conservative Prime Ministers, whose picture used to grace the cover of every edition. It helps too that the Sixth Marquess was one of the founders. (I sometimes wonder if the title misleads those who might otherwise stock it into thinking it is a local mag for Wiltshire.)
If you read a magazine only to have your existing knowledge and thoughts confirmed, you are missing the point. An intellectual magazine should challenge you, and show you new fields, new ideas and new ways of approaching topics. I frequently get up in arms about some of the articles, but that is rather the point. This is not the bland sap in the large publications. Larger magazines are unable to define their own ‘Overton window’ and are too easily swayed by an apparent tide of opinion, to suppress ideas which may cause a fuss and just churn out the usual, with perhaps a new artist or author featured or a new country to wander in, but new ways of thinking might cause a fuss and shed a reader or two. The Salisbury Review on the other hand had its greatest boost in publication when it caused a major scandal that reached the national news.
The scandal was the Ray Honeyford article, describing his experience as a teacher encountering cultural attitudes from some Asian parents at his school. The magazine republished the article on later occasions, and I recall the first time I thought it true but inflammatory, the second time mild, and the third time I could not see what the fuss was about. Sir Roger himself wrote an article about the article and what the resultant storm tells us about the race-industry:
The magazine has had many stellar contributors: Roger Scruton of course, but also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Margaret Thatcher, Václav Havel, Hugh Trevor-Roper and many more. In such company, we cannot fail to be enriched.
The magazine features each quarter an eclectic selection of articles which may range from the personal to international politics. Academics and journalists at the conservative end regularly appear, some under a pseudonym for reasons we well understand, or individual one-off contributors, but being high-brow is not enough: one of their recent regular contributors is a tattooist, who gives a moving insight into a part of society with which many readers may be unfamiliar but would be better to understand. Theodore Dalrymple regularly contributes, telling of the those who pass through a doctor’s surgery or a prison infirmary. With the fall of the Red Wall we must look beyond the cosy circle of our own dinner party guests.
Perhaps as enlightening are the regular book and television reviews, both positive and negative – there are many eye-opening books with which I would have been unfamiliar otherwise, and other I now know to avoid. It reintroduced also many ‘conservative classics’. (As a result, Dostoyevsky is now back on my reading list.)
It is a shame that public libraries are not stocking the Salisbury Review. Libraries do carry magazines with political themes, but never this one, for some reason. Maybe the title confuses them. If readers can break that wall, do.
The magazine has never tried to be fashionable: its contributors were elucidating the reason and necessity of Brexit long before it became popular, and exploding fashionable nostrums for the nonsense they is I every issue, and not just by rants but by cold logic and data.
It is uplifting to find a magazine which actually writes what I am thinking and speaks those truths which those of us with jobs to keep quiet about. If it were just a confirmation of existing prejudices though it would be of little use, and instead the Salisbury Review every time takes me outside my comfortable circle to new, unfamiliar areas or new ways to see those I thought I knew, and for that I cannot but praise it and urge others to subscribe.
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