Perhaps the most notable feature of the Register’s output is how consistent was its perspective over the years. Consistency is not necessarily the most admirable of virtues, since it may well indicate a stubborn blindness to changes that are occurring in the world. On the other hand, it may also indicate a refusal to indulge in passing fads and fashions. We avoided this . . . 

These words are Ralph Miliband’s, from his survey in the 1994 Socialist Register of its “direction, policy and output since its first appearance” thirty years earlier. They may still serve as a useful marker for reflecting, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, on the Register’s longevity despite the Left’s many defeats, disillusionments, and retreats.

Miliband used to say that the Register “should be hard to write for, as well as hard to read” — by which he meant that since the kind of essays it published demanded considerable effort on the part of the reader, contributors had a responsibility to work hard at producing essays that were not only of high analytical quality but also as readable as possible. While free of the procedural rigmarole associated with academic refereed journals, the commitment to both literary and analytic quality meant it was hard work to edit too, in various senses: deciding who could best tackle a given topic as each volume was planned; assessing whether drafts submitted showed enough potential to go ahead with; providing careful and extensive editorial commentary on each essay; and making sure that the style of writing was clear and accessible at a time when the opacity and clumsiness of much intellectual discourse affected the Left like a plague.