"This was certainly the case in Manchester, where Poetry Nation (founded by Michael Schmidt and C. B. Cox in 1973, relaunched in 1976 as PN Review and still going strong) was published twice a year on a fraction of the New Review’s budget and at almost twice the cover price. (PN’s Arts Council subsidy in 1976/7: £2,100.) It was unremittingly hostile to the New Review and its Editor. Alan Munton depicted them as belonging to a decaying line in bourgeois humanism and Donald Davie questioned why a putsch on the London literary scene could never be mounted by literary-minded students from red-brick universities such as (say) Manchester, challenging the “Oxbridge stranglehold on our literary life”." David Collard • TLS

---