The Salisbury Review

The Salisbury Review is a quarterly British "magazine of conservative thought". It was founded in 1982 by the Salisbury Group, who sought to articulate and further traditional intellectual conservative ideas.

The Review was named after Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, the British prime minister at the end of the nineteenth century. The philosopher Roger Scruton was the chief editor for eighteen years and published it through his Claridge Press. From 2000 the editor was the historian and hoaxer A. D. Harvey. The managing editor from 2006 to 2012 was Merrie Cave. The editor as of 2012 is Myles Harris who is a practising doctor and journalist.

Contributors have included Antony Flew, Christie Davies, Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Václav Havel, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Norman Stone, Theodore Dalrymple, Roger Watson and Peter Mullen.

History

The publication was founded in 1982 by the Salisbury Group, who chose Roger Scruton as editor for his defence of traditional conservatism in The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) in opposition to the Thatcherite proponents of the free market. The Salisbury group itself was set up in 1978 to support the view of the Third Marquess of Salisbury that "good government consisted of doing as little as possible."

In The Spectator of 21 September 2002 Scruton wrote an article, "My Life Beyond the Pale", in which he explained what he saw as the difficulties "of finding people to write in an explicitly conservative journal".