Areté: A Retrospective

Over thirteen years, Aret has published six Nobel Prize T S Eliot, William Golding, Boris Pasternak, Orhan Pamuk, Harold Pinter, and Rudyard Kipling. The distinguished roster of contributors includes Milan Kundera, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Patrick Marber, Christopher Hampton, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, David Lodge, Julian Barnes, Christopher Logue, Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Bennett, Rose Tremain, Rosemary Hill, Candia McWilliam, Wendy Cope, Frances Stonor Saunders, Nicholson Baker and Rachel Polonsky. Aret began in the winter of 1999. Not long after, Robert McCrum, then Literary Editor of the Observer, advised his readers to buy issues of the magazine as collectors items. Because, he assured them, the magazine would shortly close down. We have reached Issue 40. This Retrospective is 500 pages of survivor guilt.