As a long-term subscriber to, and enthusiastic reader of, the New Yorker, I was simultaneously primed to enjoy this collection of essays, and anxious in case it somehow besmirched the true object of my affection. Happily, I've come out with my obsession intact, and knowing and appreciating the New Yorker a little better than before.

Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical represents the tip of a rich body of research currently engaged in tracing the New Yorker's influence on a range of areas; the recent publication of Elizabeth Bishop's letters to the New Yorker (Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, edited by Joelle Biele (2011) and Thomas Kunkel's Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker (2015)) represent just two of several recent publications in the field – with more, no doubt, to come. Certainly, material relating to the almost one hundred years of the periodical's influence (it was founded in 1925) is to be found in the archives of many modern and contemporary writers of note.

Writing for the New Yorker comprises, in effect, the proceedings of a recent University of Cambridge symposium on the theme. Scholars from Cambridge make up the majority of the contributors; of these, all but one is from the Faculty of English. Surprisingly, there is only one participant based in the United States. Do these background details matter? Probably not, but they may explain the slight sameness of tone and emphasis across the collection – exacerbated, perhaps, by an implicit orientation towards the New Yorker at mid-century. This was a key moment in its history, certainly, although one would find matters of equal interest at various other periods from the 1930s through the unsettled Robert Gottlieb/Tina Brown years to the present day when the New Yorker seems to go from strength to strength. And it does sometimes show in the recapitulation of certain myths or reçus that might usefully have been picked apart. For example, the credo that the New Yorker was primarily a publisher of lame verse in this period, and since, is belied by the appearance in its pages of work by poets as disparate as Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gary Snyder and Rae Armantrout, to name but a few. It would have been good to read something about more recent – and even current – writing for the New Yorker; this is touched on only in passing: for example, in Tom Perrin's brief allusion to the Dwight Macdonald/Tom Wolfe (metaphorical) handover of the cultural baton and in Kasia Boddy's reference to Roger Angell's sports blogs.

Still, it seems churlish to lament what isn't here when there's so much of quality and interest that is. Of particular note are Sarah Cain's well-argued essay on the commodification of fact-checking at the New Yorker (her point is that this laborious process becomes a luxury good, available only to the few), Fiona Green's account of the perennially fascinating Marianne Moore/Ford Motor Company encounter, Deborah Bowman's nimble reading of Muriel Spark's proofing process, and Thomas Karshan's wide-ranging account of John Updike's New Yorker career as light-verse poet, reviewer, newsman and much more. The best of the essays are those that take an unexpected theme or direction: Kasia Boddy's fascinating account of the softly-softly rise of sports writing, or Duncan Kelly's incisive and evenhanded reading of Hannah Arendt's relationship with the magazine at pivotal moments in her career. In these – as indeed in most of the other essays – thorough archival research (primarily among the New Yorker records, now held at the New York Public Library) has delivered some valuable insights.

What do we learn from this book? That the New Yorker continues to exert a sometimes inexplicable pull on contributors and readers alike? That its carefully constructed and reinforced self-narrative precedes it and to a large extent determines our reading of it? That without it, the literary and cultural history of New York – and indeed, once we take the authors considered here into account (Plath, Updike, Cheever, Arendt), the broader state of American letters – might have been quite different, and considerably less interesting.