The idea that literary journals gain something by being yoked to a single theme seems to me one of the mildly dubious aspects of the enterprise. I suspect the tendency grows from a fear of disorder – ‘the anarchy of randomness’, as Adam Phillips puts it. But if these organs do require some unifying concept, it should ideally be a determination on the part of their contributors not to be herded into acquiescence with any one position. The true pleasure to be had from their pages is the jostle of selfhoods, the dust and din of competing subjectivities, rather than a communal reinforcement of, or opposition to, the status quo. As with any muster, it is the breakaways that provide the best exercise.

But editors, whose responsibility it is to impose order on chaos, must furnish some broad rubric; and the reviewer must attend to it in response. So, here, the Zeitgeist settles upon the urban and its declinations. Each journal, after its particular fashion, and to a greater or lesser degree, is interested in the particular density and texture that the urban experience proffers: either in the way that culture, politics or history manifests itself in urban space, or through the artistic responses such space inspires.