Subscriptions

The Direct Debits have been undergoing a bit of a reshuffle in recent months.

A charity or two go out of favour and have to be replaced and then magazines come under review. The TLS has found itself under pressure in recent weeks but earns a reprieve with features on Virginia Woolf, George Eliot and Louis MacNeice this week.
Chief rival to the TLS, which I only took up the special offer on last year to follow correspondance arising from our seminal Shakespeare letter, is the London Review of Books, which will no doubt get its extended chance in due course. But an advert last week tempted me to consider the James Joyce Quarterly and only a good lokk at their website persuaded me it was more than I required.
My history of magazine subscriptions runs from Rover (and Wizard), through The Listener and Weekend Racing Blue, to a few old littlepress poetry magazines, then Poetry Review, PNR and now the TLS and Gramophone. The Observer has been dropped after over 30 years of regular Sunday reading and, quite honestly, The Times on Saturday provides book reviews, the crossword and regular features that make it the closest thing, though still a long way from, the sort of magazine that provides what one wants to read.
However, it is in the same way that one writes poems because no other poet is writing quite the sort of poems one wants to read that I maintain this website. There isn't exactly the sort of magazine available that I'd like to subscribe to, so I write my own.