British Marxist journal — and, through its Verso Books imprint, English-language Marxism's most durable publishing operation — founded in January 1960 by the merger of two short-lived post-1956 magazines: The New Reasoner, edited by E.P. Thompson and John Saville out of the exodus of historians from the Communist Party over Hungary, and Universities and Left Review, edited by Stuart Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel, Gabriel Pearson, and Charles Taylor out of Oxford. The two journals' readerships did not entirely trust each other — Thompson's generation was ex-CP and historical; Hall's was younger, more metropolitan, more interested in culture and sociology — and the merger was a negotiated truce that has shaped the journal ever since. Hall was the first editor.
In 1962 control passed to Perry Anderson, then twenty-four, who bought the journal out of debt with family money and kept editorial control for most of the next sixty years. Under Anderson (with Tom Nairn, Robin Blackburn, Juliet Mitchell, and others) the Review turned decisively toward Continental Marxist theory — publishing Sartre, Althusser, Gramsci, Lukács, Benjamin, Habermas, Bobbio, Bahro, Rossanda, Arrighi, Balibar, Negri, and Žižek in English, often for the first time — and set out a controversial diagnosis of British "peculiarities": the Nairn-Anderson theses of the mid-1960s argued that Britain had missed a proper bourgeois revolution, and that its resulting political-cultural formation (monarchy, gentry, empire) explained the weakness of both its Left and its modernization. E.P. Thompson replied at length in The Poverty of Theory and the journal's pages; the argument never fully resolved, and its rejoinders still structure British left-historiography.
Verso (originally New Left Books, founded 1970) has published much of the serious anglophone Left in book form for the past half-century — Mike Davis, Tariq Ali, Benedict Anderson, David Harvey, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Owen Hatherley, Enzo Traverso. The Review itself relaunched in 2000 with a second series, continues bimonthly, and remains the clearest single publication through which anglophone readers encounter the serious Left internationally — Chinese, Latin American, Indian, Turkish debates landing in English prose rather than via American academic mediation. Its politics have been consistently to the left of mainstream social democracy, attentive to geopolitics, historically materialist, and — especially under Anderson — willing to publish at essay length (20,000+ words) in a way no other English-language general magazine still does.