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Editorial Correspondence
The Editorial Correspondence relates principally to the period 1944–65 with letters classified by topic. The material is separated into different boxes for each of the editors: principally Martin himself, with smaller volumes of material relating to his successors, John Freeman and Paul Johnson. Correspondents from the post-war period include Hugh Gaitskill, George Bernard Shaw and Leonard Woolf.
The 1950s and early 1960s files include letters generated by the Russell-Khrushchev-Dulles Correspondence. In November 1957, the New Statesman carried ‘An Open Letter to Eisenhower and Khrushchev’ by Bertrand Russell in which he implored Americans and Soviets to abandon ‘the attempt to spread [your] creed by force of arms’. In what was to be an unprecedented coup for the magazine, the letter drew a lengthy personal response from Khrushchev and, later, one from US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The New Statesman Archive and the Kingsley Martin Archive between them record the background correspondence with all the key players.
An addition to the Archive documents a libel case brought against
the New Statesman by the Portuguese government over allegations of
torture of prisoners under the Salazar regime in 1959. These papers
were added to the Archive in 1997 by Judith Taylor, daughter of John
V Allen, the New Statesman’s libel adviser who offered counsel
to a succession of editors until the 1970s.
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