The Press: Light Up in London

Reader's Digest was the first U.S. magazine to be printed in Britain after the wartime blackout. Last week the second one popped up in London bookstores. Unlike the Digest (circ. 11 million), the second U.S. entry—Partisan Review—is a highbrow magazine almost as unfamiliar to most Americans as it is to Britons. But it quickly sold out.

To such English intellectuals as Critic George Orwell and Editor Cyril Connolly, the bi-monthly Partisan Review is the voice of the U.S. intellectual Left. If so, it is a small (circ. 6,500) and often confused voice. Once Communist, it shifted to quasi-Trotskyite, is now vaguely Marxian...