The Salisbury Review

About The Salisbury Review

Overview

The Salisbury Review is a quarterly British magazine of conservative thought, founded in 1982 by the Salisbury Group to articulate and further traditional intellectual conservative ideas. Named after Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, the British prime minister at the end of the nineteenth century, the magazine has published political and cultural commentary for more than four decades. Its official online home is salisburyreview.com.

The magazine's pages cover conservatism, politics, culture and art, with articles on all aspects of public life, social policy and the arts, including discussions of subjects not generally aired in the mainstream press. The philosopher Roger Scruton was its chief editor for eighteen years, and its contributors have included Antony Flew, Christie Davies, Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Václav Havel, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Norman Stone and Theodore Dalrymple.

The Salisbury Group

The Salisbury Group was set up in 1976 by the 6th Marquess of Salisbury and others, dedicated to the political vision of the Third Marquess of Salisbury, who had famously declared that good government consisted in doing as little as possible. The group held informal meetings and published pamphlets, but it needed a regular publication to articulate a tradition of social thinking much older than the Thatcher revival of the 1970s, which some members felt over-emphasised the importance of economic policy.

The magazine began in 1982, the year of the Falklands conflict and of the post-Afghanistan “peace offensive” launched by the Soviet Union. The magazine's own account notes with pride that it has survived when so many small-circulation magazines do not, and that it is now over 40 years old.

Roger Scruton's editorship

The Salisbury Group chose Roger Scruton as editor for his defence of traditional conservatism in The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), written in opposition to the Thatcherite proponents of the free market. Scruton was the chief editor for eighteen years and published the magazine through his Claridge Press.

Scruton later described the difficulties of editing an explicitly conservative journal. In a 2002 article in The Spectator titled “My Life Beyond the Pale”, he explained that finding writers and subscribers had initially been difficult, and he recalled that the philosopher Maurice Cowling had told him that trying to encapsulate conservatism in a philosophy was the kind of quaint project that Americans might undertake. Of the editorship itself he wrote that it had cost him many thousand hours of unpaid labour, a character assassination in Private Eye, three lawsuits, two interrogations, one expulsion, the loss of a university career in Britain, contemptuous reviews, Tory suspicion, and the hatred of decent liberals everywhere, and that it was worth it.

The Honeyford affair

A controversy involving Ray Honeyford, the headmaster of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, Yorkshire, gave The Salisbury Review considerable publicity in 1984. Honeyford had written in the magazine about what the Review described as the folly of multiculturalism in schools, and the ensuing row led to attempts to defend him that produced libels and the persecution of other contributors.

The magazine's own history treats the episode as its first great success: the resulting publicity increased subscriptions, delivering the 600 subscriptions the magazine needed to survive. During those years, the magazine recalls, speaking at universities could involve vicious and sometimes physical attacks, and in Britain the Salisbury Review might as well have been a samizdat publication because of the fury directed at some of its contributors.

Behind the Iron Curtain

During the 1980s the Review became known in underground circles in Eastern Europe, and a regular column gave dissidents behind the Iron Curtain the opportunity to express their ideas and comment on events. The magazine's anti-communist stance and its willingness to publish voices that could not be heard in their own countries made it a point of contact between Western conservatism and Eastern European dissent.

Among the magazine's celebrated contributors from the dissident world were Václav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, figures whose presence in its pages testified to the seriousness with which the Review took the struggle against totalitarianism. The column for dissidents was one of the magazine's most distinctive features in its first decade.

Later editors

From 2000 the editor was the historian A. D. Harvey, and from 2006 to 2012 the managing editor was Merrie Cave. From 2012 the editor was Myles Harris, a practising doctor and journalist, who carried the magazine into its fourth decade.

More recent event listings have described Alistair Miller as the magazine's current editor, including a 2025 Battle of Ideas satellite event on the future of conservatism at which Miller was scheduled to discuss Roger Scruton's legacy and the future of the conservative tradition. The continuity of the editorship across more than forty years has been one of the magazine's defining features.

Contributors and content

The magazine's contributor roll reads as a catalogue of conservative and contrarian intellectual life. Alongside Scruton himself, its pages have carried work by the philosophers Antony Flew and Roger Watson, the sociologist Christie Davies, Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Norman Stone, the writer Theodore Dalrymple, and the clergyman and commentator Peter Mullen.

The Review conveys the ideas and concerns of what it calls genuine conservatism, with articles on all aspects of public life, social policy and the arts. Its pages discuss subjects not generally aired in the mainstream press, and during the twentieth century its editorial line held that while Conservatives had spent more time in office than the other parties, culturally they had never been in power, a diagnosis that shaped its cultural criticism.

The first editorial statement

The magazine's subscriber site republishes the editorial statement that appeared in the first edition of The Salisbury Review in September 1982, presenting it as a continuing statement of the magazine's principles. The republished statement anchors the modern magazine to its founding purposes: to articulate a traditional conservatism rooted in social thinking older than the political fashions of any single decade.

That continuity of purpose has been one of the Review's most consistent themes. From the Falklands-era launch through the editorships of Scruton, Harvey, Harris and their successors, the magazine has presented itself as the heir of the Salisbury Group's original project, a quarterly journal giving voice to a conservatism of institutions, culture and tradition.

Survival and independence

The magazine's survival is itself part of its story. Small-circulation journals of ideas are notoriously fragile, and the Salisbury Review's ability to keep publishing quarterly for more than forty years, through changes of editor, ownership pressures and the transformation of the media landscape, is a considerable achievement.

That survival has depended on a loyal readership willing to subscribe to a journal that has never sought mass circulation. The magazine remains a subscription-based quarterly, with its archive and current issues available through its website, and it continues to publish the kind of long-form conservative argument that first defined it in 1982.

Place in conservative publishing

The Salisbury Review occupies a unique position in British conservative publishing. Older than the modern think-tank world and more intellectually ambitious than party-political journalism, it has served for four decades as the principal journal of traditionalist conservative thought in Britain.

From Scruton's eighteen-year editorship through the Honeyford affair, the dissident columns of the 1980s and the magazine's survival into the digital age, the Review has remained what its founders intended: a quarterly magazine articulating a tradition of social thinking older than any single government or party leadership, named for the Victorian prime minister who believed that good government consisted in doing as little as possible.