and proved an ideal backer—he never interfered. Indeed, I never even met him...Apart from Swift and myself there was no other staff, for we had determined to cut out all unnecessary expenses...The first number of X was carefully planned, and well received. Philip Toynbee hailed it in the Observer as 'an event, if only because a literary magazine of this kind has not existed for a long time. The admirable impression of a review devoted to attacking both the corruptions of an established avant-garde and the dreary "retrenchments" of the age is reinforced by every article and poem which appear here.' In a leading article the Times Literary Supplement was also laudatory: 'A concern for "rethinking" about the nature of literary and artistic experience is apparent throughout the pages of X, and gives the whole of the first issue a unity uncommon among periodicals now'... About 3,000 of the first number were sold, and the circulation remained at this figure, more or less, until its demise. Much of its impact was due to the layout that Patrick Swift designed, and to its unusual format, which was in fact determined by the dimensions of a menu card in a caff off Victoria Station where we happened to be having a cup of coffee. To begin with we were resolved to avoid insularity. Poems, essays, and graphics by European writers and artists...appeared in our pages... Swift was, of course, responsible for the art side of the magazine. These were the boom years of abstract art. Swift, twenty years ahead of his time...[promoted] the work of then unknown or unfashionable figurative painters, among them the young Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and Craigie Atchison, and such as-yet uncanonized painters as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and the forgotten David Bomberg [To say nothing of the continentals like Kokoschka, Giacometti, André Masson]. Examples of their work were reproduced; more importantly, it was Swift's idea that the artist should speak for themselves, which was achieved either by transcribing their tape-recorded conversation... or by publishing their notes. Swift’s unearthing and editing of David Bomberg’s outspoken and apocalyptic 'pensées', scattered about his miscellaneous papers, was an outstanding contribution... All exercises in criticism or exegesis published in X were written by practising painters, writers, or poets... Our first two numbers were filled with work by writers and artists we knew, or knew of. But by the time the third number