Silvers' golden age

Robert Silvers, founding editor of the New York Review of Books, died last week in his mid-80s

Book reviews occupy an odd niche in the publishing world. They aren’t quite trade publications, they aren’t quite magazines; they aren’t quite news, they aren’t quite op-ed pages, and they aren’t quite essays. At their best, however, they combine elements of all these. They are grounded in the headlines, and thus avoid the trap of intellectualising for the sake of it; they have to refer to other people’s views – the “review” part – and so aren’t completely self-indulgent; and they bring a touch of distance, and of real thought, to their analysis and so avoid the process-fixation and the