I cannot fix the date or place of my first meeting with Peter Collier, who died at 80 on Nov. 1. It must have been some time in the late 1980s, after he and David Horowitz had their “second thoughts” about their youthful radicalism and published their notorious manifesto, “Lefties for Reagan,” in the Washington Post. The two were transformed overnight into personae non gratae, enemies of the movement.
But it was not until after Peter started Encounter Books, in 1998, that we became friends. Encounter Books was named after the English monthly Encounter, one of a suite of intellectual magazines started after World War II with the help of an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. There were Preuves in France, Der Monat in Germany, and others in Africa, Brazil, India, Italy and elsewhere. Encounter, whose founding editors were Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender, was always the flagship of the lot. The only two still surviving are the China Quarterly, based in the U.K., and Quadrant in Australia.
