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Valentine’s Day 2010, Brooklyn: an intern at the Paris Review skips his shift as an undocumented worker at an Upper East Side restaurant to have drinks with a BBC journalist and art critic visiting New York The White Review is born, or at least the drunken idea of it   A year later we launched the first print issue at Daunt Books in London’s Cheapside An unholy coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats had recently formed a government, promptly tripling tuition fees and sparking protests The first shots in the Arab Spring had been fired; anti-austerity protests in Greece exposed cracks in the facade of European solidarity that would swiftly widen; Donald Trump was briefly a frontrunner for the Republican candidacy, though his eventual decision not to stand still felt then like the inevitable triumph of sanity over satire Meanwhile, print journalism and book publishing was dying a slow death – remember the digital revolution? – and we intended to do something, though we didn’t know quite what, about it     The desire to launch a magazine was born out of our respective frustrations at the state of contemporary publishing in London, and indeed cultural and political commentary in the United Kingdom Where could an aspiring writer-critic-editor (whatever it was we were back then) hope to get published? The established literary magazines at home seemed to be closed shops, conservative either in their politics or their tastes (there were exceptions, we discovered retrospectively, among them the poetry journals Clinic and Popshot) We lamented the decline of cultural criticism and essay-length journalism, forms which seemed increasingly in danger of confinement to the ivory tower We were exasperated that the visual arts, so central to London’s culture, were so often made inaccessible to audiences without the theoretical training demanded by gatekeepers determined to protect their own territory So, inspired by the success of little magazines in New York – The Paris Review, n1,