Contemporary Literary Criticism | Hamilton, Ian - Francis King (review date 4 September 1976)

Francis King (review date 4 September 1976)

SOURCE: King, Francis. “Witty.” Spectator 237, no. 7732 (4 September 1976): 18.

[In the following review, King praises Hamilton's The Little Magazines as witty and amusing.]

The ‘little magazine’ of yesterday could best be defined as a publication in which magnitude of ambition was in inverse proportion to meagreness of funds and of sales. In England at least, all that has changed; and it can now best be defined as a publication in which meagreness of ambition and of sales is in inverse proportion to the magnitude of an Arts Council subsidy. Of the three English magazines dealt with by Ian Hamilton in this witty book [The Little Magazines]—he also deals with three American ones—The Criterion was financed for most of its life by T. S. Eliot's firm Faber and Faber; Horizon by a wealthy Maecenas, Peter Watson; and New Verse by the sale of review-copies...

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