After 40 years in charge of the New York Review of Books, you’d think that edi­tor Robert Sil­vers might yield to a brief anniver­sary cheer, that just for a moment he might roman­ti­cize the biweekly’s ear­ly days, that after build­ing one of the world’s most esteemed intel­lec­tu­al jour­nals he might even want to talk about its legacy.

But when I reached Sil­vers at his Man­hat­tan office, the Review’s 40th anniver­sary was quick­ly pushed off into a cor­ner of our con­ver­sa­tion. What real­ly ani­mat­ed him were his newest projects, the work he and co-edi­tor Bar­bara Epstein had recent­ly assigned: John Updike’s piece on an obscure art exhib­it in Hart­ford, Con­necti­cut, Steven Weinberg’s arti­cles on sci­ence, the debate sur­round­ing war in Iraq. Iden­ti­fy­ing the Review’s lega­cy wasn’t some­thing he was will­ing to do.

“I don’t know, I real­ly don’t,” he says, and begins to laugh.

“I think we have to take our stand on the accu­mu­lat­ed work we’ve done. There are many thou­sands of reviews and mil­lions of words, and who could pos­si­bly make much of a judg­ment about it? It’s so var­i­ous: so many dif­fer­ent issues, so many dif­fer­ent books, so many dif­fer­ent writ­ers. And if you’re some­one like myself, you’re obsessed by the next cou­ple of issues. They’re absolute­ly big, big chal­lenges. What will be in them, how they’re going to work out, whether some of these arti­cles will come in, and so on. That kind of ret­ro­spec­tive view, I don’t have.”

Oth­ers, how­ev­er, most cer­tain­ly do.

“I don’t think it’s too much to say that get­ting my byline in the New York Review of Books was like dying and going to heav­en,” the Toron­to-born con­trib­u­tor Michael Ignati­eff told me recently.

Indeed, Ignati­eff couldn’t think of anoth­er jour­nal — in any lan­guage — that had the same abil­i­ty to “unashamed­ly walk between the high aca­d­e­m­ic the­o­ret­i­cal world and the world of pol­i­tics and journalism.”

That bal­anc­ing act, accord­ing to Susan Son­tag, is its great­est strength. “Amer­i­can intel­lec­tu­al life,” she told the New York Times, “would be vast­ly poor­er had it not been for the Review and the mod­el it gives for how to write for a gen­er­al­ly edu­cat­ed audience.”

Since its inau­gur­al issue in Feb­ru­ary 1963, that mod­el real­ly hasn’t changed. Sil­vers and Epstein have tar­get­ed an audi­ence with the same kind of broad, odd­ly inquis­i­tive tastes as their own. Why, they won­dered, couldn’t there be a mag­a­zine that was seri­ous, read­able, and direct­ly engaged with the impor­tant mat­ters of the day?

“It’s sim­ply our own inter­ests. We real­ly don’t claim too much more than that,” Sil­vers says. “What we start­ed out doing, and have con­tin­ued to try to do, is to get writ­ers we admire to deal with the books and issues that inter­est us.”

It was actu­al­ly Epstein’s for­mer hus­band, Jason, an edi­tor at Ran­dom House, who came up with the idea dur­ing the win­ter of 1962–63, when New York’s news­pa­pers had been shut down by a pro­longed print­ers’ strike.

“He had the inspi­ra­tion that this was the only time one could start a new book review with­out any cap­i­tal because if you had a plau­si­ble plan the pub­lish­ers would take an ad,” Sil­vers recalls.

So, the Epsteins and their friends, poet Robert Low­ell and his wife, writer Eliz­a­beth Hard­wick, asked Sil­vers, then an edi­tor at Harper’s, to join them.

The first con­trib­u­tors were an impres­sive group, to be sure, includ­ing Mary McCarthy, W. H. Auden, Nor­man Mail­er and William Sty­ron. They wrote quick­ly (a three-week dead­line) and for free.

By the fall, after more than a thou­sand let­ters urg­ing them on, and a sec­ond, sum­mer edi­tion, the Review began in earnest. Mon­ey was raised and, accord­ing to Sil­vers, by the fourth year “the paper” was turn­ing a mod­est profit.

(In 1984, Rea Hed­er­man, a for­mer Mis­sis­sip­pi news­man, bought the Review for $5 mil­lion. Today, its paid cir­cu­la­tion is more than 115,000.)

Cer­tain­ly the Review’s ear­ly for­mu­la stuck: the large, brick-like logo; the newsprint with long, foot­note-laden columns; David Levine’s extra­or­di­nary draw­ings; the Per­son­als straight out of a Woody Allen sketch (“Divorced, non­re­li­gious, Jew­ish-fla­vored math pro­fes­sor, 70, book­ish, NYC, Ivy League, two chil­dren, rid­ing wave of exu­ber­ance, seek­ing surf­ing com­pan­ion, 60–75, to share the life of the mind and the body”).

Then there’s the sub­ject mat­ter, where you’ll find every­thing from dis­cus­sions on cos­mol­o­gy and Freudi­an psy­chol­o­gy to pieces on Rohin­ton Mis­try and Bar­nett New­man. In every issue, accord­ing to Sil­vers, there will also be a com­men­tary on “some cen­tral pub­lic event or chal­lenge or crisis.”

Indeed, the Review’s ear­ly days were bound up in the tur­moil of the ’60s: the assas­si­na­tion of John Kennedy and, above all, the war in Viet­nam. In 1967, a cov­er fea­tured the recipe for a Molo­tov cock­tail. Noam Chom­sky was a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor. It was a feisty, aggres­sive voice on the left. Tom Wolfe even called it “the chief the­o­ret­i­cal organ of rad­i­cal chic.”

While the jour­nal may have mel­lowed — one observ­er has called it a “mid­dle-aged, rather Estab­lish­ment voice” — it still tugs to the left of cen­tre, whether one thinks of its pieces on Yugoslavia in the ear­ly ’90s, or those more recent­ly on the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian conflict.

But the Review has, undoubt­ed­ly, had its crit­ics. Ever since the ’60s, con­ser­v­a­tives have often found its point of view par­tic­u­lar­ly unap­peal­ing. Roger Kim­ball called it “a jour­nal of blithe polit­i­cal oppor­tunism, ready at the first hint of a change in the pub­lic mood to embrace extreme, even rev­o­lu­tion­ary, ideas that were total­ly at odds with its ambi­tion to be ‘a respon­si­ble lit­er­ary journal.’ ”

Oth­ers have accused it of being Anglo­cen­tric, deaf to new­er intel­lec­tu­al trends and over­ly reliant on a tired and exclu­sive ros­ter of writ­ers. As James Wol­cott point­ed out, the only book-length study of the Review, Philip Nobile’s Intel­lec­tu­al Sky­writ­ing, “probed the inner sanc­tum of the mag­a­zine as if it were a rat­tlesnake nest.”

Still, among those who’ve worked for Robert Sil­vers, detrac­tors aren’t easy to find. Susan Son­tag, for one, has called him a “fan­tas­tic, fanat­i­cal, bril­liant” edi­tor. Joan Did­ion ded­i­cat­ed her last book to him.

“I know this is going to sound like Ceausescu’s Roma­nia, but all praise to the leader. It’s going to sound like Kim Jong Il’s Pyongyang Review of Books. It’s going to sound pho­ny as hell, because I know you’re going to speak to him, but it is the case,” Michael Ignati­eff said, in a tele­phone inter­view from Cam­bridge, Massachusetts.

“I’ve worked for a lot of peo­ple and a lot of edi­tors but until you’ve been edit­ed by Sil­vers you don’t know what mag­a­zine edit­ing is.

“You get a call on Sun­day night, if you’re in Lon­don, and it’s Sun­day after­noon in New York and he’s in the office going over your com­mas. He is say­ing, ‘I’m sor­ry we’ve checked out Fact X and it just doesn’t wash.’ ”

It is a sto­ry, Ignati­eff says, about good editing.

Once a review project is agreed upon, writ­ers tell sto­ries of “mys­te­ri­ous FedEx pack­ages” arriv­ing at the door, as Silvers’s assis­tants start send­ing out addi­tion­al books, notes and sup­port­ing mate­r­i­al on the topic.

“We’re sur­round­ed by all of these books,” Sil­vers explains. “So our thought is this: Sup­pose there are oth­er books on the sub­ject that have come in, whether on, say, D. H. Lawrence on the one hand, or the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary on the oth­er. We have our review project, and now here are some oth­er books that you [the writer] might want to look at. Don’t feel that you have to review them, but look at them, see if they’re inter­est­ing to you. We have this great admi­ra­tion for, and con­fi­dence in, writ­ers and their minds and we’re very will­ing to leave a lot deci­sions to them.”

Sil­vers, Ignati­eff points out, is also an extra­or­di­nary net­work­er, always on the look­out for who’s new and up-and-com­ing. And he’s often court­ing old­er, estab­lished writ­ers, as well.

A recent addi­tion, Sil­vers offers, is Mar­garet Atwood.

“I had read some­thing by her that made me think she might be inter­est­ed in a par­tic­u­lar book that was about to be pub­lished. So I sent it to her.”

Atwood, who Sil­vers calls “a mar­vel­lous crit­ic, very, very inci­sive,” has con­tributed four pieces over the past year.

Although he’s now in his ear­ly 70s, clear­ly Silvers’s appetite for renew­al isn’t on the wane — even if most of his con­tem­po­raries have now retired.

“That, I sup­pose, may be true. But I don’t have the faintest idea of that,” he says.

“I think the Review at the moment is in a peri­od where we are very engaged in a series of impor­tant issues. There’s no end to it. That’s all we’re inter­est­ed in: in what lies ahead.”

And with that, Sil­vers spoke about the “mar­vel­lous reviews” he soon hoped to run, includ­ing a piece on, of all things, “the whole indus­try and cul­ture of com­put­er games.

“From time to time, they give us the most enchant­i­ng sat­is­fac­tion. To have a beau­ti­ful arti­cle: that is what we feel is at the cen­tre of it all.”