So good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Conway Hall.

Thank you for coming to this first event in a series of events to mark the 40th birthday of the London Review of Books.

The proximate occasion for this event is the publication by Faber and Faber

of this rather sumptuous book entitled The Lular Review of Books An Incomplete History. We hope

it's considerably incomplete. It's a kind of annual, a bit like the Beano annual, a sort of bumper book of the LRB, and you might suspect that it would be not extremely interesting, but actually it really is. So it's full of, you know, quite fascinating things, sort of images of texts that's been edited letters from people,

descriptions of the history of the magazine and so on. It's really, really good. And we hope,

or at least favour and favour does, that you will purchase copies of this book at the end of the evening,

and there'll be a bookshop at the back.

The first issue of the London Review of Books appeared on the 25th of October, 1979,

as a 28-page insert in the New York Review of Books.

And I have here a facsimile of that edition.

And looking through it, it's really quite interesting. We have John Bailey writing about William Golding, Carl Miller on V.S. Nipaul, William Emson on Shakespeare's

Midsummer Night's Dream. Francis Window on Hethcott Williams, and that's interesting because

we've just published

Hethkett's book about Boris Johnson. It's called a study in depravity. And it's on sale at the

bookshop too, and I hope at the back. This is essentially a sales operation this evening.

So there's Hethgat Williams, Frank Commode, and then of course the most extraordinary thing is a piece by Wynn Godley, the economist.

Winn Godley asks if Britain will have to withdraw from Europe.

40 years later, here we are.

So not very much has changed, you might think.

It certainly looks much the same.

Carl Miller, who was the first editor of the London Review of Books,

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