Cosmo Landesman Toby Young and Julie Burchill (The Modern Review)
You could have knocked me down with a feather when I read in the Evening Standard last month that “legendary Nineties hellraiser magazine Modern Review” is making a comeback. It was the first I’d heard of its return since I closed it down in 1997. “Burchill won’t be involved,” a source confirmed, which is probably for the best. It won’t be anywhere as good as my one.
This month marks 30 years since the first publication of the Modern Review, the magazine which I co-founded with Toby Young, my then soulmate, and Cosmo Landesman, my then husband. Toby was a teenager when I met him in 1984, his academic family living next door to Cosmo’s in Islington. When I abandoned my first marriage and small son at the age of 24 to elope with Cosmo, I promptly annexed Toby as my amigo-in-chief. (We were such a close threesome that my son, Jack, was blessed with the middle name Tobias.)
It all started on a sunny spring day in 1990; as we queued for a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park, Cosmo and Toby were talking about Intellectual Stuff while Jack and I — both video game addicts — chattered away about Mario. When Toby joined our conversation, I remember marvelling at his ability to one minute bang on about the Frankfurt School and some bird called Theodora Dorno, and the next do an impression of Bart Simpson. It occurred to me that he was a new type of person — as much concerned with Baywatch as Beowulf — who needed a new type of magazine. And so we started to plot: “I’ll be boss because I’m the rich one and Toby, you’ll be the editor because you’re the clever one.”
It certainly helped that I was loaded. Sometime in the Eighties, in my late 20s, I was earning more than the Prime Minister and the Chancellor combined, simply by writing for newspapers and magazines. Then I pocketed an advance of £100,000 to write a smutty novel about a girl reporter on the make, called Ambition. But there’s only so much cocaine a person can take — and even after I gave away a not insignificant proportion of my earnings to charity every month, there was still quite a bit left, so I started us off with a few thousand.
A saintly patron since my impoverished teenage days, Peter York, declared his willingness to invest — and John le Carré sent us a cheque too. But it was tireless Toby who did the legwork; after a year of begging letters he amassed £16,666.50 — just £1,983,333.50 short of his £2 million target.
Toby used to say that he had “negative charisma”; he’d walk into a room and everyone would loathe him. Cosmo told me that he’d given Toby the classic anti-hero novel What Makes Sammy Run — and Toby read it as a users’ manual rather than a cautionary tale. But I never saw that: I adored him. He was full of life — more exuberant than anyone I’d ever met. So I wasn’t surprised when he gathered around him a coterie of very clever youngsters who got it completely.
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SubscribeI’m dreading the next few years of woke TV, movies, journalism, fiction, the arts in general. It’s not so much the politics as the fact it will probably be incredibly preachy and tedious.
Where do we find engaging, edgy entertainment these days?
Edgy is a gay black republican- or going to church every Sunday. It is pretty amusing that being a conservative now makes you part of the counter culture.
Where might you find engaging, edgy entertainment these days? Perhaps in the comeback version of Modern Review. Maybe they’ll have an interview with the Swedish comeback group ABBA.
But the lady here won’t be involved, in this comeback version, they say.
I’m a pariah!
I’ve always wanted to be a pariah. Never quite made it.
Try Korean drama. It’s just so much better than anything made in the west.
Julie still writes with such vibrancy and ‘couldn’t give a F**k’ attitude, I love her articles and book reviews.
I remember her comments to Guardian columnist: ‘F**k me shoes’ lol.
A revolution against woke needs Julie at the helm.
No, it was Germaine Greer who used the expression in describing the Guardian columnist.
Oh I thought it was the spat with Suzanne Moore but ur right is was Greer. Julie was with the Trans comments.
It’s the sheer colour and gaiety of life in those days – the wonderful variety of characters and views – I laughed out loud over the retort to Camille Paglia – and in a world where people realise that words are a) just words and b) meant in a variety of ways – they tickle and don’t bruise. By comparison with that, we’re in a sort of elasticated version of East Germany.
One of the problems is that the rules change every day – and as someone can be cancelled for what they said or did several decades ago, what hope is there for anyone who wants to make a name for themselves.
An increasingly frequent refrain of mine…. what has happened to the young and wild and independent? Free love? In the 60s, 70s and 80s the youth were wild, rebellious, debating and pushing the boundaries. Nowadays there is lack of freedom of speech, groupthink, illiberal mores underlined by vicious anger for the wrong reasons. The heavy lifting continues to fall on the middle aged and the old.
I was there, often in the thick of it but more as an observer, and the main part of how I experienced those days was really squalor. I spent years as a very obscure kind of person – a ‘Road Freak’, that era word for a person who spent years and years living on the road out of a back pack, broke, hitchhiking ( over 50,000 miles), living rough. A road freak being someone addicted to the road, although it was self destructive and exceedingly harsh and wasteful of ones youth – we just kept doing it because when stopped, we remained poor, but stationary in squalor, so would hit the road as at least it was variety.
I hung with all kinds, lots of Southern poor druggies and Red Necks, Hippies, and just fringe people who cannot make it in society, addicts, West Coast counterculture, and foreign peoples, university students, artists, city roughs, underclass of all kinds, Cults, and the lost souls who are displaced and miserable with no where to go who live on the fringes of the road – so I saw a lot, but mostly just sat around broke living under a bridge or off in some wild place, or on the streets or thousands of miles of walking, and standing with my thumb out, and just sitting on the ground with nothing to do.
I suppose it was ‘Wild, rebellious, independent, free’ in a way (not much love, too solitary a life being a lone, broke, drifter), but really it was mostly squalid and tedious and very harsh. But then, I did see a very great amount of the world, and of people. I saw things few ever do see.
Fascinating and different though…
Wild times, wild life, but it seems the people in it stab each other in the back a lot.
Yes, intense relationships often end nastily – but they’re generally worth it. I wouldn’t have suited a quiet life, though I respect those who do.
A lovely article, with a beautiful final paragraph.
I used to have the cassette tape of Elizabeth Hurley reading that, dirty words and all, in that unexpectedly plummy voice of hers.
It was breathtakingly smutty.
I used to think breathtaking meant something takes your breath away or stops you breathing . It actually means you breathe more deeply though .At least in your context . Or maybe stop for a second at the ‘top’
Had there been people like Julie and Toby at the Maxwell empire, Captain Bob might not have taken that midnight swim and pensioners might not have been swindled out of hundreds of millions of pounds. He’d have relished bankrupting them, and it’s a great pity we can’t enjoy the article Posh Spice took on the chin.
It’s a pity, too, that Julie isn’t tempted to set up her own reincarnation of the Modern Review. We know it would be far better, still it would be entertaining watching her prove it and there are plenty of haughty Paglia-types around today to take on. That fax fight was a warning – and worth reading.
I’d never heard of Moder Review. After reading this, I’m kind of glad.
Just what was THAT magazine? Was it highbrow looking into low-brow? Or low-brow looking into highbrow? Why have I just hyphenated “low-brow” and not afforded the same respectability of apparent educative learning that the hyphen represents to “highbrow”? Perhaps folk might pronounce “low-brow” as lobro without its hyphen, you see. So the hyphen is a good sign. A sign that helps to make distinct the differing levels of cultural worth. Though it does afford “low-brow” a certain higher respectability than it deserves. In which case maybe “highbrow” should be hyphenated, to give it a little extra sophistication. Just like when you see hyphens evident all over posher coffee shop signboards written in chalk.
Why wouldn’t it be hobro?