From Grub Street to the Arab Street

The irony in all this was that, while working on the book, I had profited from a conversation with John Gross in which he had counselled me to keep in mind the degree to which, early and later, reviewing had been mixed up with politics. His point was in no danger of escaping me now.

The remoteness of his worldview from mine had been brought home to me by the London Journal that, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, John Gross contributed to the US conservative magazine, the New Criterion. For him, Britain under the New Labour government of Tony Blair was a coarsened country mired in tawdriness.

In a barbed riposte to my remarks, a New Criterion ally of John Gross cast me as a bilious hack who, stung by a put-down in the TLS, had taken his grievance all the way from Grub Street to the Arab Street. That Gross’s review rankled I won’t deny, but it was his politics that provoked me far more - especially when, despite his caustic view of Tony Blair, he signalled his support for the Iraq war.

Two decades on, I am grudgingly grateful to John Gross for his tart critique. In truth, I was perhaps fortunate even to publish a book that in an era of deepening polarisation between mainstream and academic publishing was an anomalous hybrid. For like the reviews it commemorated, Articles of Faith was aimed at that fabled figure, the inquisitive general reader.

Enshrined in the periodical press was the ambition to forge a common intellectual culture, a public of omnivorous, inquiring minds. It’s an ambition to which descendants of the Edinburgh Review still nod, and it surely remains a laudable one, impossibly quixotic though it has become amid the dizzying cultural diversification of the 21st century. I don’t think politics would have stopped John Gross from agreeing with me about that.

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