NB by JC is a selection from James Campbell’s NB columns, which he wrote each week for the Times Literary Supplement from 1997, when he inherited it from David Sexton, until his departure in 2020. By turns entertaining and vexatious, NB presents a different tone from the remainder of the paper while sharing its underlying seriousness and its scepticism about literary and political fashions. If you’re a subscriber, the back cover, NB’s natural home, is quite likely the first thing you read, even before turning to the smoking ruins on the letters page. It’s hard to imagine the paper without NB, though that won’t stop people wishing it away. At present, it continues in the safe hands of Michael Caines. Although Campbell cites Private Eye as a precursor of NB’s sceptical contrarianism, the column would not belong anywhere else.

The paper came into existence in 1902, serving as a temporary overspill from The Times proper, and then more or less accidentally survived attempts to kill it off, including one launched by Lord Northcliffe, who ‘ironically’, as the NB column would not say, died before he succeeded. It is the necessary vice of journalism to write its own encomia, but the TLS has embodied a kind of seriousness which has become all the more valuable in the rising tide of drivel. NB is, at times, the TLS with the gloves off.

What has NB liked under James Campbell’s stewardship? The list includes lucidity, common sense, regard for language, avoidance of jargon, interesting second-hand bookshops with reasonably priced stock, the novels of Baldwin, Faulkner and Gissing, and various learned journals. The list may seem rather short compared with the number of perceived