12 AUGUST 1955, Page 7

MR. KRISTOL, who has been an editor of Encounter since

the magazine began, is returning to America in the autumn. He should not be allowed to go without being congratulated on his part in seeing Encounter through its first difficult years : It might be argued that it has drawn on too limited a circle of writers, and that it has a somewhat deadening ring of the Thirties about it. The names that crop up are the names one would expect if the editor-in-chief were, say, Mr. Stephen Spender. (Actually, it is Mr. Stephen Spender.) Still, Encounter is one of the very few monthlies of generalised intellectual interest in Britain today.