Universities and Left Review was founded in 1957 by Oxford students
Raphael Samuel, Gabriel Pearson,
Charles Taylor, and
Stuart Hall. The initial impetus behind the magazine came from the events of 1956, particularly the
Suez crisis, the
Soviet invasion of Hungary and
Khrushchev's revelations about the Stalin's purges, that triggered shockwaves throughout the British left. As Hall was later to write, these events were "as significant to us as 1968 was to become to a later generation." The magazine's first issue was produced in spring of 1957, and contained essays by three of the founding editors, Pearson, Hall and Taylor, as well as contributions from the artist
Peter de Francia,
Lindsay Anderson the noted British New Wave filmmaker, the economist
Joan Robinson, historians
E.P. Thompson,
Eric Hobsbawm and
Isaac Deutscher, and the town planner
Graeme Shankland. Later issues would include essays by
Samuel,
Raymond Williams,
Richard Hoggart,
Isaac Deutscher,
John Strachey,
Peter Sedgwick,
Ralph Miliband,
Karel Reisz,
Margot Jefferys,
John Berger and others, and feature design by future design director of Penguin Books,
Germano Facetti. The photographer
Roger Mayne contributed images for the covers of issues 4, 5, 6, and 7. The magazine was self-consciously inspired by
Left Review, the literary and cultural magazine of the
Communist Party of Great Britain that developed a sophisticated modernist cultural politics in the 1930s. It was equally inspired by the socialist humanist magazine
The New Reasoner, founded by E.P. Thompson in 1956, whose aim was to espouse a form of Marxist humanism against Communist Party orthodoxy.
ULR would, however, be marked from its predecessors by its openness to debate, as well the influence of the burgeoning youth culture of late 1950s Britain. Notable was the debate on "classlessness," inaugurated by Hall's essay "A Sense of Classlessness" from
ULR 5, that sparked responses from both Samuel and E.P. Thompson in later issues. In late 1959,
ULR merged with fellow socialist magazine
New Reasoner to produce the
New Left Review. ==See also==