Here it is, then: Universities and Left Review. Very well got up, good typography; indeed, the Abbey Press (the people who print it) are to be complimented on having a range of bold, large and display types almost sufficient to keep up with the editors' delight in Names. The cover bears the contributors' names (Isaac Deutscher, Claude Bourdet, Peter de Francia, E. P. Thompson, G. D. H. Cole, Joan Robinson, etc..) in massive black letters, their topics in small ones. ( . . . )

What purpose, then, does the Universities and Left Review serve? Pretentious, empty of ideas, its material picked from ideological dust-heaps, it has set out to make a splash—or, as the first editorial put it, to take a beachhead. Its avowed purpose is to publish discussion on “the common ground of a genuinely free and genuinely socialist society.” Its way, the editors say, is “to take socialism at full stretch — as relevant only in so far as it is relevant to the full scale of man's activities.”