On 12 April 1913 the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb founded the New Statesman as a weekly review of politics and literature – two topics that reflected their vision of a better world. The Webbs and friends such as George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells had hopes for the magazine, though not necessarily high ones: “If I were forced to wager,” Beatrice wrote in her diary, “I should not back our success.” She was to prove herself wrong: the magazine has not only endured for more than a century but attracted many of the greatest writers and thinkers of the age as contributors.
A selection of some of the standout pieces from the magazine’s history has now been published as Statesmanship: The Best of the New Statesman (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). The book encapsulates the magazine’s position as a keen if sceptical interrogator of current affairs, culture and the shifting concerns of a tumultuous age. Among those writers it contains who have aired their own unique perspective on the state of the world are George Orwell, DH Lawrence, EM Forster, Bertrand Russell, JB Priestley and Graham Greene while more recent contributors include Martin Amis, Richard Dawkins, Sally Rooney, Ian McEwan and John Gray.
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