Critical Quarterly, the magazine 'in whose stable' PNR was delivered in its infant form as Poetry Nation, and from which we learned many early lessons, is celebrating its quarter century. A special issue of the magazine and an impressive collection of essays on Shakespeare are published to mark the occasion, and it is an occasion to celebrate. Critical Quarterly has gone through several phases. The earliest is likely to remain its most durable: it was founded at just the right time to be a vehicle for a wealth of new talents emerging in the late 1950s, and the names of Plath, Hughes, Larkin, Gunn and many others became familiar to readers and teachers in its pages. It set itself the task of providing serious criticism for these poets-enabling both for new readers and for the poets themselves. It has maintained a commitment to those writers and to the values they stand for, while at the same time giving a warm welcome to later-comers, including Heaney, Waterman, Davis and some of the Martians. Its most public phase was during the Black Paper on Education controversy, when it took a firm stand and weathered the wrath of the new educational establishment, and it maintained that stand so that many important educational issues could actually be openly debated. Those debates had consequences, and Critical Quarterly must be given credit for being the one literary journal in the last quarter-century to affect government policy and thus our educational environment. The Black Papers were hard to ...