Cirrus@Austlit

'Early last year, when Robert Silvers died, one of his many former assistants recalled her time working for him at the New York Review of Books, the legendary magazine that he co-founded and edited for over half a century: His admiration for writers was unsurpassable. He was adamant that he was not one himself. ‘It’s a dog’s work,’ he said whenever anyone tried to glamorize his own fifty-year-long endeavor to facilitate the flourishing of American intellectual life. He loved being the dog'  (Introduction)