Encounter(magazine)

Encounter

Categories	Literary magazine
Frequency	Monthly
Founder	Stephen SpenderandIrving Kristol
First issue	October 1953(1953-10)
Final issue	1991
Company	Encounter Ltd.
Country	United Kingdom
Based in	London
Language	English
ISSN	0013-7073

Encounterwas aliterary magazinefounded in 1953 bypoetStephen Spenderand journalistIrving Kristol.The magazine ceased publication in 1991. Published in the United Kingdom, it was an Anglo-American intellectual and cultural journal, originally associated with theanti-Stalinist left.The magazine received covert funding from theCentral Intelligence Agencywho, along withMI6,discussed the founding of an "Anglo-American left-of-centre publication" intended to counter the idea ofCold Warneutralism. The magazine was rarely critical of American foreign policy and generally shaped its content to support the geopolitical interests of theUnited States government.

Spender served as literary editor until 1967, when he resigned.The revelation of the covert CIA funding of the magazine occurred that year. He had heard rumours but had not been able to confirm them.Thomas W. Braden,who headed the CIA'sInternational Organisations Division's operations between 1951 and 1954, said that the money for the magazine "came from the CIA, and few outside the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called theCongress for Cultural Freedom."Frank Kermodereplaced Spender, but he too resigned when it became clear the CIA was involved.Roy Jenkinsobserved that earlier contributors were aware of U.S. funding but believed it came fromphilanthropists,including a Cincinnati gin distiller.

Encounterexperienced its most successful years in terms of readership and influence underMelvin J. Lasky,who succeeded Kristol in 1958 and would serve as the main editor until the magazine ceased publication in 1991. Other editors in this period includedD. J. Enright.

Founding, funding and first editors

Representatives of MI6 and the CIA met in 1951 to discuss the creation of an “Anglo-American left-of-centre publication”, partly to counter theNew Statesman.Three intelligence officers,Michael Josselson,Lawrence de NeufvilleandMonty Woodhouse,worked out the financing and distribution of the publication, using the CIA funded and managedCongress for Cultural Freedom(CCF) as cover.Encounterlaunched in 1953. The CIA provided much of the funding through a dummy foundation. Funding from Britain was provided in the form of cash given to the magazine’s managing editor or cheques signed byAlexander KordaandVictor Rothschild,both of whom were aware of the set up.

In 1963,Donald McLachlan,editor of theSunday Telegraph,published an article which revealed that theUK Foreign Officewas covertly fundingEncounter.The article caused consternation among the UK and US intelligence services, which convincedEdward Heath,who was McLachlan's source, to tell McLachlan that the information was incorrect. TheSunday Telegraphissued a retraction in which it withdrew "any suggestion there might have been that the Foreign Office provided a subsidy and that the editorial independence ofEncounteris not in question ".

The covert partial funding ofEncounterby theCentral Intelligence Agency(and Britain'sMI6), via such American organisations as the Farfield Foundation, and thence to the CCF, was revealed in 1967 in the pages ofRamparts,The New York Times,and theSaturday Evening Post.According to CIA officialRay S. Clinethe journal "would not have been able to survive financially without CIA funds".Its bibliography shows shifting patterns of high-journalistic political allegiance, especially in the cultural sphere. Shifts on both sides of the Atlantic triggered by the rise of the "neoconservative"tendency in opposition to the prevailing left-liberalism in elite opinion are evident.

The choices for the first twoEncounterco-editors, the American political essayistIrving Kristol(1920–2009) and the English poetStephen Spender(1909–95) were telling, and in retrospect, can be seen to have set in template much of the course of the magazine's evolution even over its final twenty-three years succeeding Spender's resignation in 1967, after the revelations of covert CIA-funding.

Irving Kristol and the New York intellectuals

Irving Kristol edited the political articles inEncounterfrom 1953 until 1958, and though still a self-described liberal at the time, he was already laying the foundations of his eventual stance, from the late 1970s until his death in 2009, as the "godfather of neoconservatism." Influenced by his experiences in theCity College of New Yorkcafeterias of the late 1930s, where Marxists, Trotskyists and Stalinists argued freely, Kristol had already, as early as 1952, in his writings inCommentaryduring theMcCarthyyears,set the tone for the neo-populist critique of liberal "new class" elites he would later seed during his almost forty-year stint (1965–2002) as founding co-editor ofThe Public Interest,the public-policy quarterly.

Stephen Spender and the English literary legacy

Stephen Spendercut a larger figure in strictly cultural circles, though with strong political engagements of his own – he was, at 44, one of England's leading men of letters of his generation, having been a prime constituent of the 1930s "MacSpaunday"generation of young English poets whose other members includedLouis MacNeice,W.H. Auden,andC. Day Lewis.During his brief Communist phase in the 1930s, he had served in theSpanish Civil Warwith the anti-FrancoInternational Brigadesand later contributed to the essay collectionThe God That Failed(1949) edited byRichard Crossman.The other contributors who had become disillusioned with Communism includedLouis Fischer,André Gide,Arthur Koestler,Ignazio Silone,andRichard Wright;Koestler and Silone would in turn become from its outset regular contributors toEncounter.Spender's apprenticeship in the editor's chair had come over a decade before when he served as deputy to the English aestheteCyril Connollyin editing, for its first two years, the influential literary monthlyHorizon(1940–49), many of whose writers would show up inEncounterin due course throughout the 1950s and after.

Spender's range of cultural contacts, in and out of the academic world, combined with the high-stakes sense of Cold War cultural mission driving the Paris-based CCF, enabledEncounterto publish, especially during its first fourteen years prior to the revelation of the early CIA funding and the defections so provoked, an international range of poets, short-story writers, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and journalists, from both sides of theIron Curtain.The long tail of theBloomsbury,World War I,andBright Young Thingsgenerations of the early 20th century was a marked feature of the early years of Spender's tenure as the editor of theEncounter's literary pages, with contributors such asRobert Graves,Aldous Huxley,Nancy Mitford,Bertrand Russell,Edith Sitwell,John Strachey,Evelyn Waugh,andLeonardandVirginia Woolf– Virginia in posthumous diary form, her surviving husband Leonard as a political essayist and reviewer.

Oxbridge and London academics

Encounterprovided a prime forum for academics from the colleges ofOxford,Cambridge,andLondon Universities—Isaiah Berlin,Hugh Trevor-Roper,andA. J. P. Tayloramong them—who discussed European history and the intellectuals helping to shape it. Trevor-Roper used the magazine as an outlet for his attacks, one on Arnold Toynbee's best-selling ten-volumeStudy of History,and onThe Origins of the Second World Warby A. J. P. Taylor.

Early outings byEncounterbelletrists came whenNancy MitfordandEvelyn Waughplayfully debated over successive issues the fine points of upper-class vs. lower-class English usage ( "U and non-U" ), as didC. P. Snowand others,if less playfully, Snow's depiction within of a yawning chasm of mind between the "Two Cultures"of the hard sciences and the humanities. Among the magazine's early luminaries in aesthetics and the history of art wereStuart HampshireandRichard Wollheim.

Political contours

On the political side ofEncounter,Kristol brought on board many members of the group usually known asThe New York Intellectuals,both journalist, literary and polemical or social-scientific, among whom he had passed the years of his apprenticeship: the sociologistsDaniel BellandNathan Glazer,who, respectively, would later serve as his successive co-editors (and, like Spender, political foils, especially in Bell's more pronounced case) atThe Public Interest,Sidney Hook,and, not least, the ideological hummingbird and scourge of "Midcult"Dwight Macdonald,who spent a year (1955–56) in London as associate editor, a tenure with which he would later attempt to make a retrospective reckoning in his "Politics" column inEsquirefor June 1967 in what he would describe several months later as his "Confessions of an Unwitty CIA Agent".MainlineAmericans for Democratic Action-style left-liberal Democrats such asArthur Schlesinger, Jr.andJohn Kenneth Galbraithrounded out the American contours in politics, while the early English contributions in politics came largely from the social-democratic, anti-Communist, anti-unilateral nuclear disarmament wing of the Labour fold, as represented by C.A.R. Crosland (Anthony Crosland) (a close friend of Daniel Bell), R.H.S. Crossman (Richard Crossman), andDavid Marquand,with occasional contributions from Conservative journalists such asPeregrine Worsthorneand the youngHenry Fairliebroadening the coverage.

Encounterprovoked controversy, with some British commentators arguing the journal took an excessively deferential stand towards United States foreign policy.Cambridge literary criticGraham Houghdescribed the magazine as "that strange Anglo-American nursling" which had "a very odd concept of culture indeed".The Sunday Timesreferred toEncounteras "the police-review of American-occupied countries".

Discussing theEncounterof the 1950s,Stefan Colliniin 2006 wrote that althoughEncounterwas not "narrowly sectarian in either political or aesthetic terms, its pages gave off a distinct whiff of Cold War polemicizing".

Melvin Lasky and the 1960s

The transition to Kristol's replacement on the political side ofEncounterin 1958 byMelvin J. Lasky(1920–2004) was seamless, and a key factor both in the broadening of the magazine's international scope to include a deeper extension of its European coverage, from the Soviet bloc not least, as well as its coverage of the newly decolonised nations of Africa and Asia. After combat with the seventh army and postwar service in Berlin under military governorLucius Clay,Lasky founded the German-language monthlyDer Monat(The Month), and, amid an adult life spent largely ever since in Germany, was enlisted in 1955 back in New York to edit the first two numbers ofThe Anchor Review(1955–57), an annual published by the newAnchor Booksimprint ofDoubleday,fruit of the 1950s quality-paperbackrevolution spearheaded byJason Epstein,and whose international roster of high-humanist contributors – Auden, Connolly, Koestler, Silone – made it resemble a concurrent mini-Encounter.

Ties to Eastern Bloc dissidents

During his 32 years atEncounter,Lasky, with his balding head andVan Dyke beardcentrally cast as an inverted Lenin, proved instrumental in the long and dedicated cultivation of contacts from among the persecuted writers ofPoland(i.a.Czesław Miłosz,Zbigniew Herbert),East Germany,Hungary, Romania, theSoviet Union,and then-Yugoslavia,and devoted extensive front-cover coverage throughout the 1960s and 1970s to the judicial travails in Russia ofAndrei Sinyavsky(aka "Abram Tertz", under whichnom de plumeseveralsamizdatshort stories appeared),Yuli Daniel,Joseph BrodskyandAleksandr Solzhenitsyn,and in Poland to the case ofLeszek Kołakowski,the philosopher exiled to the West in 1968 by thePolish Communist Party,and who became one of the magazine's defining contributors, whose blend of intellectual history and anti-Soviet militancy made him a sort of Slavic cross betweenIsaiah BerlinandSidney Hook.A special 65-page anthology in April 1963, "New Voices in Russian Writing,"presented, with the aid of translations by poetsW. H. Auden,Robert Conquest,Stanley KunitzandRichard Wilbur,a selection of the latest works of the rising generation of Russian poets and short-story writers, among themAndrei Voznesensky,Yevgeny Yevtushenko,andVasily Aksyonov( "Matryona's Home,"the most-read short story by Solzhenitsyn, was held over until the next issue).

Focus on decolonised nations

As for the nations of the so-called developing world, thanks in part to Spender's early attention to mattersecht-English, the aftermath of theBritish Empirenot least, Indian affairs, especially as they involved writers and intellectuals, were prominent on the contents page, with the heterodox essayist and memoiristNirad Chaudhuriamong the earliest of the magazine's long-serving correspondents from the subcontinent. Lasky, for his part, having written and publishedAfrica For Beginnersin 1962, made a point of devoting a special issue to that continent, along with others devoted to Asia andLatin America.

Changing times

The 1960s would prove to be the high-water mark ofEncounter's time on the world newsstand. As distinguished symposiasts from diverse spheres debated in its political sections such matters as the advisability of Britain's entry into theEuropean Economic Community,the expansion of its tax-funded higher-education system, the aftermath of empire and the strains of assimilating the influx of immigrants from the decolonised nations, and the latest false dawn for socialists in Cuba, a rising generation of critics and scholars engaged the newly arrived high thinkers of the age –Clifford Geertz,R.D. Laing,Claude Lévi-Strauss,Konrad Lorenz,György Lukács,Marshall McLuhan– and speculated on the prospect of other false dawns in culture rather than politics. In the case of the imagined Arcadia presaged by the new wave of "high pornography", reformers likeOlympia PressfounderMaurice Girodiasweighed in for the defence, with conservative sociologistErnest van den Haagcountering with a measured defence of the social need for both pornography and censorship, with the youngGeorge Steiner,dissenting from what to him seemed the neo-totalitarian import entailed by the literal stripping of literary characters of any vestige of privacy, in contrast to the more artful metaphoric indirections of such masters as Dante.

English poets

Encounterwas eclectic in the poets it published. Its literary co-editors generally had a background in poetry, with Spender succeeded by the literary criticFrank Kermode.There were the critics, novelists and poetsNigel Dennis(1967–70) andD. J. Enright(1970–72), and the poetAnthony Thwaite(1973–85). Poets affiliated from the 1950s withThe Movement—Kingsley Amis,Robert Conquest,Donald Davie,Enright,Thom Gunn,Elizabeth Jennings,Philip Larkin,andJohn Wain–contributed to the magazine, in many cases, in fiction and in essays also. Conquest, an independent historian of the Stalin years in Russia (The Great Terror,1968), held a sceptical attitude toward left-liberalism. Amis published inEncounterin 1960 an article against the expansion ofhigher education,that proved influential.

Left-liberals vs. early neoconservatives

The more explicit development of that very scepticism, as it happened, came to mark the evolution of the political side ofEncounteras it entered the 1970s and beyond. The ideological fissures in the world of Anglo-American political/literary journals began to see hairline crack turn to outright cleavage in the wake of the rise of theneoconservativemovement. The biweeklyNew York Review of Books,founded in 1963, began to enlist from its outset a regular roster of the cream of the very sort of prestige British humanists and scientific essayists who had so distinguished themselves in the pages ofEncounterin its first ten years, creating a rival outlet for them whose greater prominence in the much larger American market would only deepen after the 1967 high-profile resignations of Spender and Kermode, both of them at the very summit of Anglo-American literary life.

The then largely intra-Democratic rifts issuing from reactions to, for instance, theVietnam War,student radicalism and theNew Left,urban strife, theGreat Society,the rise ofBlack Powerandaffirmative action,played out on the contents pages of the highbrow journals in a sharpening of sides among the political contributors to the liberal-to-radical (in politics if not in art and literature)New York Reviewin opposition to the post-1970 rightward shift ofCommentaryunder Norman Podhoretz; theNew York Reviewhad already as of its third year (1965, when Kristol and Bell foundedThe Public Interest) shed the future neoconservatives who had marked its first two years.Another sign of the times came in 1972, when Daniel Bell, firmly of the social-democratic, anti-Stalinist, Old Left/Menshevik tendency, resigned from his co-editorship ofThe Public Interest,rather than strain his long friendship with Irving Kristol, who had recently left the Democratic fold and come out, forRichard Nixon,easing into his final four decades in the ideological orbit of, e.g., the editorial page ofThe Wall Street Journal.Some among the nascent neoconservatives, like Bell's successorNathan Glazer,would remain Democrats, while others would form theReagan Democratsand go on to play a pivotal role in the 1980 and 1984 elections.

1970s

The economic crisis of the 1970s, afflicting all the world's advanced democracies with a corrosive blend of decade-long inflation, sector-wide industrial strikes, overburdened welfare states expanded under pressure of an affluence-driven "revolution of rising expectations", the overturning of the supremacy ofKeynesian economicsunder a simultaneous inflation and recession long thought inconceivable, and the resulting unravelling of the postwar, bipartisan social-democratic consensus – such was the stuff of a good portion of the debate on domestic affairs within Encounter throughout the 1970s. Those from the center-left addressing such topics included the veteran analysts of capitalismAndrew ShonfieldandRobert Skidelsky,biographer of Keynes, and economic historian of Depression Britain. Among those from the developing New Right to assail eminent thinkers leftward was the Australian-born LSE political scientistKenneth Minogue,among whose many contributions was a stinging rebuke to John Kenneth Galbraith for offering, in his 1977 documentary seriesThe Age of Uncertainty,far more wit than wisdom– a charge to which the Harvard economist replied, wittily.

Novelist and political writer,Ferdinand Mount,then in his thirties and later to serve as a Thatcherite policy adviser early the next decade, did regular double duty as political essayist and book reviewer. And thirty years afterThe Road to Serfdomhad made the name ofFriedrich A. Hayekknown among the non-economist educated public, the Austrian-born thinker, in the decade that saw his writings earn him both theNobel Prize in Economicsand a starring role in the education of the English prime minister newly arrived at its end, contributed four essays in the history of ideas, among them one on "The Miscarriage of the Democratic Ideal"and another on his cousinLudwig Wittgenstein.Shirley Robin Letwin took the American liberal legal philosopherRonald Dworkinto task for promoting judicial activism in his signature workTaking Rights Seriously,while the conservative philosopherRoger Scruton,a recentEncounterhand, examined the cultural roots of latter-day ills, and economist EJ Mishan> assayed the parasitic moral hazards arising from economic growth. And lively debate over the north–south divide, the Brandt Report, and western foreign aid to the 'Third World' was on hand courtesy of the prestigious development economistPeter Bauerand his critics.

Hazards of détente

In foreign affairs in the 1970s,Encounter's prime interests, along with Euro-terrorism and Euro-communism, included the strains upon thedetentewith the Soviet Union inaugurated during the Richard Nixon andGerald Fordyears posed by the military buildup and underlying intentions, conventional and nuclear, of the Soviet Union, the latter's renewed adventurism-by-proxy in the Middle East and in Africa, and its ongoing abuses in human rights and in the coerced psychiatric treatment of dissidents. One of the prime set-pieces among the hawk-vs-dove needle-matches underway came with a six-instalment series in which the eminent diplomat-historian — and "containment"theorist of the first years of the Cold War —George F. Kennan,then in his early seventies, squared off against his critics in the form of several interviews he had granted toGeorge UrbanofRadio Free Europe,with detailed rejoinders — and another mutual follow-up round — in succeeding issues by the veteran historian of the Russian empire at theUniversity of London'sSchool of Slavonic and East European Studies,Hugh Seton-Watson,byRichard PipesofHarvard— the latter due in several years for a post helpingRonald Reaganplot strategy toward the Soviet Union — andLeopold Labedz,Polish-born editor ofSurvey,a quarterly journal of Soviet-bloc affairs. The exchanges, marked each time on the part of Kennan's critics by a ritual and almost incantatory deference to his stature and role as almost Old Testament wise man, grew increasingly testy on both sides, with Seton-Watson accusing Kennan of allowing his aristocratic-utopian hand-wringing over Western cultural degeneracy to vanquish his sense of the moral urgency and legitimacy of the west's need to better defend itself against a newly hardened foe, with Pipes accusing him of an overly-optimistic estimate of relaxation in Soviet military strategy since the death of Stalin, charges amplified by Labedz. Kennan, for his part in reply, fired back from several angles with a long-running complaint of his, perhaps best summarised as: nobody understands me.

Contributing literary figures

The range of literary figures, some young and others established, whose first contributions toEncountercame during the 1970s included novelistsMartin Amis,Italo Calvino,Elias Canetti,Margaret Drabble,Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,Paul Theroux,D.M. Thomas,William Trevor,critics and essayistsClive James,Gabriel Josipovici,Bernard Levin,David Lodge,Jonathan Raban,Wilfrid Sheed,Gillian Tindall,poetsAlan Brownjohn,Douglas Dunn,Gavin Ewart,James Fenton,Seamus Heaney,Erica Jong,Michael Longley,John Mole,Blake Morrison,Andrew Motion,Tom Paulin,Peter Porter,Peter Reading,Peter Redgrove,Vernon Scannell,George Szirtes,andR. S. Thomas.

1980s and end of the Cold War

The final decade forEncounter,the 1980s, was marked by regular elegy for old and distinguished friends of the magazine who had aged along with it, chief among them the Hungarian-born writerArthur Koestlerand the French political philosopher and journalistRaymond Aron.Longtime social-democrat friend of the magazineSidney Hookdied at 86 in July 1989, missing by less than six months the peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, previewed his memoirOut of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth CenturyinEncounterin the mid-1980s. AsBrezhnevgave way toAndropov,then toChernenkoand finally toGorbachev,such contributors as former Labour cabinet secretary (Lord) Alun Chalfontwere dedicated to exposing what they saw as the errors of assorted unilateralist disarmers in the peace movement and foes of nuclear deterrence such as the English historianE.P. Thompson,as the NATO agreement to counteract Soviet SS-20s in the European theatre took shape. The Polish resistance still covertly active after the crushing of theSolidaritytrade union movement by martial law received ongoing coverage.Encounter's range of political contributors edged closer to the stateside neoconservative orbit found in the 1980s grouped round, such asCommentary,the editorial page ofThe Wall Street Journal,and theAmerican Spectator.

Edward Pearce,a regular contributor to the magazine in the 1980s, claimed thatEncounter'seditors reassigned him from political writing to theatre criticism after he repeatedly used hisEncountercolumn to criticise theThatcher government.

Though the literary side ofEncounterthroughout the 1980s featured a far smaller proportion of writers at the forefront of their national literatures as had its 1960s incarnation under Stephen Spender, and a 1983 change in cover design scrapped its austere "Continental" template in favour of a glossy look more characteristic of proverbially "slick" periodicals familiar from American newsstands, given the lofty heights from which it would recede, it still sustained its nonpolitical autonomy and ample proportions when the English poetAnthony Thwaitewas replaced in 1985 byRichard Mayne,an English journalist, broadcaster, translator from the French, the magazine's Paris correspondent and "M." columnist, and former assistant toJean Monnet,architect of theEuropean Economic Community.

Encounterpublished its final issue in September 1990, almost a year after the fall of theBerlin Walland the collapse of Communist rule in theEuropean satellites,and a year before the largely peaceful demise of Soviet rule itself. The magazine's end was brought about due to its increasing debts.TheBradley Foundationacquired the name and helped close down theEncounterorganisation in 1991.

Assessments

Thanks to the uncommon distinction, disciplinary and geographic range of the contributors it brought together in one venture, especially during the years 1953–67 prior to the CIA-funding revelations,Encounterearned regard as a high-water mark in postwar periodical literature. In a review of recent work by Stephen Spender inThe New Republicin 1963, the American poetJohn Berrymanwrote, "I don't know how Spender has got so many poems done, especially because he does many things besides write poetry: he is a brilliant and assiduous editor (I would callEncounterthe most consistently interesting magazine now being published). "In the early 1970s, the American monthlyEsquiresaid ofEncounterthat it was "probably not as good now as when it was backed by the CIA, but [it is] still the best general monthly magazine going."In the late 1970s,The Observerwas of the opinion that "Encounteris a magazine which constantly provides, in any given month, exactly what a great many of us would have wished to read... there is no other journal in the English-speaking world which combines political and cultural material of such consistently high quality ", while theInternational Herald TribunecalledEncounter"one of the few great beacons of English-language journalism... a model of how to present serious writing."In a review in 2011 inThe New Republicof a posthumous collection of essays by Irving Kristol, Franklin Foer wrote that "Encounter... deserve[s] a special place in the history of the higher journalism... [it] was some of the best money that the [CIA] ever spent. The journal, published out of London, was an unlikely coupling of the New York intelligentsia with their English counterparts—an exhilarating intermarriage of intellectual cultures. I am not sure that any magazine has ever been quite so good as the earlyEncounter,with its essays by Mary McCarthy and Nancy Mitford, Lionel Trilling and Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Wilson and Cyril Connolly. In his typically self-effacing manner, Kristol heaped credit upon Spender for the achievement. "

Richard Wollheimsaid thatEncountergave "the impression that it was the whole spectrum of opinion they were publishing. But invariably they were cutting it off at a certain point, notably where it concerned areas of American foreign policy”. One CIA chief describedEncounteras "propaganda in the sense that it did not often deviate from what the State Department would say US foreign policy was".Frances Stonor Saunderswrote in 1999 thatEncounteris "rightly remembered for its unflinching scrutiny of cultural curtailment in the communist bloc. But its mitigation ofMcCarthyismwas less clear-sighted: where the journal could see the beam in its opponent’s eye, it failed to detect the plank in its own ".

Most prolific authors

The following is a list of all authors who appeared inEncounterat least ten times:

• Dannie Abse(16)
• Anna Adams (11)
• F.R. Allemann (15)
• Kingsley Amis(11)
• Raymond Aron(37)
• W.H. Auden(33)
• A. J. Ayer(12)
• Luigi Barzini(25)
• Daniel Bell(16)
• Max Beloff(71)
• Bernard Bergonzi(22)
• Vernon Bogdanor(13)
• Francois Bondy(70)
• Jorge Luis Borges(13)
• John Bossy(14)
• Malcolm Bradbury(24)
• Edwin Brock(16)
• D.W. Brogan(32])
• Alan Brownjohn(42)
• Zbigniew Brzezinski(10)
• Alastair Buchan(19)
• Anthony Burgess(13)
• Alun Chalfont(10)
• Michael Charlton(10)
• Nicola Chiaromonte(10)
• Robert Conquest(21)
• Hilary Corke(42)
• Maurice Cranston(33)
• C.A.R. Crosland(18)
• R.H.S. Crossman(17)
• Brian Crozier(10)
• Marcus Cunliffe(30)
• Nigel Dennis(43)
• Milovan Djilas(12)
• Douglas Dunn(52)
• Alistair Elliot(14)
• D.J. Enright(80)
• Martin Esslin(25)
• Gavin Ewart(37)
• H.J. Eysenck(15)
• Henry Fairlie(24)
• François Fejtő(11)
• Leslie Fiedler(11)
• Constantine FitzGibbon(17)
• John Fuller(11)
• Roy Fuller(22)
• P. N. Furbank(18)
• T.R. Fyvel(27)
• John Gohorry(19)
• Geoffrey Gorer(17)
• Julius Gould(15)
• K.W. Gransden(17)
• Günter Grass(11)
• Robert Graves(13)
• Herb Greer (11)
• Geoffrey Grigson(30)
• John Gross(18)
• Paul Groves(13)
• Louis J. Halle(10)
• Michael Hamburger(19)
• Stuart Hampshire(19)
• Patrick Hare (14)
• Anthony Hartley(64)
• Ronald Hayman(18)
• John Holloway(20)
• Sidney Hook(30)
• Michael Howard(18)
• G.F. Hudson (12)
• Ted Hughes(10)
• Michael Hulse(16)
• Dan Jacobson(15)
• Elizabeth Jennings(18)
• Jenny Joseph(11)
• Elie Kedourie(20)
• Frank Kermode(31)
• Roy Kerridge (11)
• Arthur Koestler(19)
• Leszek Kołakowski(12)
• Irving Kristol(46)
• Leopold Labedz(22)
• Walter Laqueur(26)
• Melvin J. Lasky(72)
• Laurence Lerner(39)
• Norman Levine(10)
• Penelope Lively(12)
• Michael Longley(13])
• John Loveday (12)
• Edward Lowbury(10)
• Richard Löwenthal(39)
• Edward Lucie-Smith(15)
• Herbert Lüthy(18)
• George MacBeth(14)
• Dwight Macdonald(17)
• Colin MacInnes(24)
• Alasdair MacIntyre(12)
• John Mander(24)
• Golo Mann(17)
• David Marquand(21)
• Derwent May (11)
• Gerda Mayer(10)
• Richard Mayne(including "M." and "R.M" of "Books Encountered" feature) (172)
• George Mikes(19)
• Stephen Miller (10)
• Kenneth Minogue(21)
• E. J. Mishan(13)
• John Mole(39)
• Jan Morris(pre-April 1973 as James Morris) (39)
• Blake Morrison(10)
• Ferdinand Mount(16)
• Kathleen Nott(15)
• Frank Ormsby(17)
• Tom Paulin(16)
• Edward Pearce(66)
• Peter Porter(56)
• Isabel Quigly(11)
• Jonathan Raban(11)
• Herbert Read(10)
• Peter Reading(19)
• Peter Redgrove(38)
• Goronwy Rees(including as columnist "[R.]" ) (158)
• Jean-François Revel(61)
• Eric Rhode(13)
• Theodore Roethke(11)
• David Rokeah (18)
• Alan Ross(20)
• Carol Rumens(11)
• Malcolm Rutherford(13)
• William Sansom(12)
• Vernon Scannell(27)
• Leonard Schapiro(10)
• Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.(12)
• Peter Scupham(10)
• Hugh Seton-Watson(16)
• Edward Shils(22)
• Andrew Shonfield(22)
• Ruth Silcock (10)
• Burns Singer(18)
• Stephen Spender(45)
• George Steiner(24)
• Christopher Sykes(31)
• David Sylvester(17)
• George Szirtes(17)
• D.M. Thomas(14)
• R.S. Thomas(20)
• Anthony Thwaite(38)
• Gillian Tindall(13)
• Charles Tomlinson(10)
• Philip Toynbee(18)
• William Trevor(11)
• Hugh Trevor-Roper(14)
• George Urban(13)
• John Wain(42)
• Vernon Watkins(10)
• George G. Watson(20)
• John Weightman(86)
• Peter Wiles (12)
• Nicholas Snowden Willey(14)
• Angus Wilson(26)
• Richard Wollheim(12)
• Peregrine Worsthorne(15)
• David Wright(17)

See also

• CIA and the Cultural Cold War,for the general concept
• Congress for Cultural Freedom– CIA program to fund European magazines
• Who Paid the Piper?,book by Frances Stonor Saunders published by Granta Books (UK) in 1999 (US edition published asThe Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters,The New Press, 2000)