Spectator, The

a weekly review of politics, current affairs, and the arts begun in 1828 by Robert Stephen Rintoul, whose choice of title invoked the illustrious example of the early eighteenth-century periodical. Following Rintoul's retirement in 1858, a succession of editors maintained the moderate radicalism of the journal, regarded by William Gladstone as ‘one of the few papers which are written in the fear and love of God’. Although current affairs were its principal concern in the early 1900s, much space was devoted to book reviews and Katharine Tynan, Henry Newbolt, Siegfried Sassoon, and Ivor Gurney were among the authors of the poems featured every week. From 1922 to 1938 a literary supplement was produced; its reviewers included Richard Aldington, V. S. Pritchett, Stephen Spender, and Michael Roberts. Edith Sitwell, Patrick Kavanagh, William Plomer, Edwin Muir, and Edmund Blunden were among the poets whose work appeared in its pages in the 1920s and 1930s. Louis MacNeice and Graham Greene respectively wrote regular reviews of the theatre and cinema in the earlier years of J. Wilson Harris's. editorship from 1932 to 1954, when Sir Ian Gilmour became owner and editor. Since then the Spectator has been among the liveliest journals of political commentary, Bernard Levin and Auberon Waugh having contributed much to its incisive and sometimes irreverent tone.