Modern Review was the name of a London-based magazine reviewing popular arts and culture, founded by Julie Burchill

Julie Burchill

Julie Burchill is an English writer and journalist. Beginning as a writer for the New Musical Express at the age of 17, she has written for newspapers such as The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She is a self-declared "militant feminist". She has several times been involved in legal action...

, Cosmo Landesman

Cosmo Landesman

Cosmo Landesman is a journalist and editor and son of Jay and Fran Landesman. With his then wife Julie Burchill, he set up the magazine The Modern Review. The magazine eventually folded, and Burchill left him for Charlotte Raven, one of the magazine's female interns.After the experience Landesman...

 and its editor, Toby Young

Toby Young

Toby Young, MA, FRSA is a British journalist and the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, the tale of his stint in New York as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine...

. It was published from 1991 to 1995 and principally financed by Peter York

Peter York

Peter York, real name Peter Wallis, born 1943, is a British management consultant, author and broadcaster most famous for co-authoring Harpers & Queen's The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr...

. Amongst its high-profile contributors were Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby is an English novelist, essayist and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels High Fidelity, About a Boy, and for the football memoir Fever Pitch. His work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists.-Life and career:Hornby was...

, Will Self

Will Self

William Woodard "Will" Self is an English novelist and short story writer. His fictional style is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical. He is a prolific commentator on contemporary British life, with regular appearances on Newsnight and Question Time...

, James Wood

James Wood (critic)

James Wood is a literary critic, essayist and novelist. he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.-Background and education:...

 and Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia

Camille Anna Paglia , is an American author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984...

. At one point, Paglia and Burchill conducted a long-running slanging-match by fax

Fax

Fax , sometimes called telecopying, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material , normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device...

, which was reproduced in full in the pages of the magazine.

The Reviews mission statement was to cover "low culture for high-brows" and it aimed to give equal cultural weight to Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

 and Bart Simpson

Bart Simpson

Bartholomew JoJo "Bart" Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons and part of the Simpson family. He is voiced by actress Nancy Cartwright and first appeared on television in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987...

.

The magazine's circulation started at around 5,000 copies, rising to a peak of 30,000 with the controversial Elizabeth Hurley

Elizabeth Hurley

Elizabeth Jane Hurley is an English model and actress who became known as a girlfriend of Hugh Grant in the 1990s. In 1994, as Grant became the focus of worldwide media attention due to the global box office success of his film Four Weddings and a Funeral, Hurley accompanied him to the film's Los...

 edition, containing a cassette tape of the actress reading passages of erotic prose from Burchill's latest book. By 1995, with the magazine hit by financial difficulties, the circulation subsided to 10,000 copies and soon after it ceased publication when its founders fell out, Toby Young "torching" the magazine with its final issue after Burchill had an affair with writer Charlotte Raven

Charlotte Raven

Charlotte Raven is a British author and journalist.She studied English at Manchester University. As a Labour Club activist there in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was part of a successful campaign to oust then student union communications officer Derek Draper, though she subsequently had a...

.

Publication was started again in 1997 by Burchill with Raven editing, but the second, much glossier and more mainstream incarnation survived for only five issues.

External links

• Observer review of the BBC4 2005 documentary, When Toby Met Julie (28 June 2005).