‘The greatest literary editor there has ever been’ – John Banville remembers Robert Silvers

By John Banville

The death this week of the New York Review of Books editor marks the loss of one of publishing’s most brilliant minds

Robert Silvers was one of the most significant cultural figures of our time. This will seem a large claim to make about the editor of a twice-monthly literary magazine, but then the New York Review of Books – or “the paper”, as Silvers always called it – was more than your usual lit mag. There had been great journals before it, of course, notably the Times Literary Supplement and the Paris Review – which Silvers edited for a time. But the NYRB was a unique phenomenon: unapologetically intellectual, politically radical, distinctive in its high-toned New York fashion and wholly committed to civilised values. And from the outset Silvers was its heart and, more importantly, its brain.