Editor of The New York Review of Books

Born: December 31, 1929;

Died: March 20, 2017

ROBERT B Silvers, who has died aged 87, was the redoubtable editor of The New York Review of Books who helped establish and maintain the magazine's considerable literary influence.

The review was conceived in late 1962, in the midst of a newspaper strike in New York, when poet Robert Lowell and his wife, the author and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, met at the Upper West Side apartment of Barbara and Jason Epstein, a publishing executive. They shared an old lament - the dreadfulness of book reviews - and saw a chance to change it.

Lowell secured a loan of $4,000 and Mr Silvers was brought in as co-editor.

The first issue was published in 1963, with the declaration that no time would be wasted on books "trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or call attention to a fraud". Norman Mailer, William Styron and others quickly agreed to write for the new publication though they initially were not paid.

Widely appreciated and honoured, the review has published classic essays by Mailer, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal among others, and even managed to turn a profit, although it has sometimes been criticised as elitist, insular and prone to running far more work by men than by women.

The magazine was an early opponent of the Iraq War and a frequent critic of Donald Trump. In 2012, accepting an honorary award from the National Book Critics Circle, Mr Silvers said that while the review avoided editorials, its stance from the beginning was "to be sceptical of state power and to take the side of people who had suffered from it".

State power, in turn, suspected the review. An FBI report from the 1960s cited Mr Silvers for using "individuals with 'leftist tendencies' to review books dealing with security matters and the US government".

For decades, Mr Silvers and Ms Epstein presided lovingly over every word and punctuation mark, every cover and every assignment, with the imposing, Anglicised Silvers (Wolfe once wrote that Silvers' accent "arrived mysteriously one day in a box from London") specialising in politics and history and science, and the short, outgoing Ms Epstein in fiction and the arts.

Mr Silvers was often at work at nights on holidays, surrounded by assistants at the review's book-mobbed offices.

Mr Silvers was an opera fan and socialite who lived on Park Avenue with Grace, Countess of Dudley, widow of the 3rd Earl of Dudley, who died last year.

A businessman's son, Mr Silvers was born in Mineola, New York, and grew up on a farm in Huntington.

He was an early reader who absorbed books of all sorts. By 15, he had been admitted to the University of Chicago and he needed just two-and-a-half years to graduate.

In his twenties, he served as press secretary for Connecticut governor Chester Bowles, worked in the Paris offices of Nato and was an editor for The Paris Review.

He was an assistant editor at Harper's when Jason Epstein called and asked him to join The New York Review of Books.

As Mr Silvers recalled, his editor at Harper's wished him luck and predicted he would be back in a month.

Mr Silvers served on the boards of the PEN American Centre, the Council of Foreign Relations and other organisations, and edited several essay collections.

In his 2012 speech at the book critics ceremony, he said among the pleasures of editing was the anticipation, knowing that he was going to encounter something delicious, pleasurable or fine.

He saw himself as "someone who dreams of bringing together the writers he admires and a group of readers he hopes will appreciate them. And then stays out of the way".