Now (1940–1947 magazine)

NOW was a British political and literary magazine which George Woodcock in April 1940, while he was living in his mother's house in Marlow, Buckinghamshire and working in a variety of posts in the headquarters of the Great Western Railway at Paddington Station, London. He was prompted to start Now because of the closure of Horizon, which he rejected as being 'too much of a mandarin journal to continue the avant garde role of such little mags of the late 1930s as Twentieth Century Verse and Contemporary Poetry and Prose'. Consequently, faced with a 'sudden silencing of voices', Woodcock decided to start a magazine 'for young and disaffected writers', for which he received financial help from a group of local pacifists. Now was published in two series. The first series was published from 1940 to 1941 and comprised seven issues. Woodcock published the second series in 1943, when he was by now living in London, after having undergone a period of turmoil in his personal and political lives. It comprised nine issues, the last one being July/August 1947.

In his Introduction to the first (Easter) issue of Now, Woodcock wrote that Now 'would seek to "perpetrate good writing and clear thought."' He later elaborated: 'Now was established early in the war as a review for publishing literary matter and also as a forum for controversial writing which could not readily find publications under wartime conditions', and stated that its writers 'included Anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, pacifists, and New Statesman moderates.'

In 1945 Now published "Sexuality and Freedom", by Marie-Louise Berneri, the Italian anarchist, which was one of the first discussions of the ideas of Wilhelm Reich in Britain.