Long before she joined the LRB, in the late 1950s, Wilmers showed her true colours on a trip to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, she recalls, her fellow Oxford students "went on the sly to visit [Boris] Pasternak" while she "instead travelled several stops on the Metro to look at some heavy machinery, out of a feeling — what possessed me? — that I should acknowledge what the Soviets did well." 

Whatever it was that possessed her then has never departed. She spent 20 years writing her only book, The Eitingons: an apologia for her Russian-Jewish relations Max, Motty and Leonid Eitingon — a shrink, a crook and a killer — which assumes that in the 20th century, unless you were a Freudian or a Stalinist, you didn't really count. She describes herself as "neither communist nor anti-communist, captivated by the Left but never quite of the Left". 

The facts tell a slightly different story. In Bad Character, a privately-printed festschrift for her 70th birthday in 2008, her LRB colleague Jean McNicol compiled "You and Non-You", a Wilmers glossary. Under "Stalin" we read that "bad Stalin and bad communism pieces don't find favour" with the editor of the LRB. Wilmers tells a Guardian interviewer: "I don't think it's necessary to say how bad it all was." 

On Israel, however, she finds condemnation is all too necessary, having been converted by Edward Said. A list of her contributors reads like a roll-call of the anti-Zionist, anti-American Left, from Tariq Ali to Slavoj Zizek, from Eric Hobsbawm to Tom Paulin. Virtually the only Tory to have written regularly for the LRB was the late Sir Ian Gilmour, who hated Israel and Margaret Thatcher in equal measure. In an interview with Anne McElvoy, Wilmers was at least frank about her prejudice: "I'm unambiguously hostile to Israel because it's a mendacious state."

It was in the LRB that The Israel Lobby appeared in 2006. This article, by the American political scientists Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, has unleashed a flood of conspiracy theories. Thanks to them, the notion of an all-powerful network of Zionist agents, neocon think-tanks and Jewish plutocrats manipulating US foreign policy has now become received wisdom in left-wing circles on both sides of the Atlantic. 

This overtly or covertly anti-Semitic propaganda is now parroted in senior common rooms, where the LRB is required reading for the academically ambitious. Its influence permeates British culture through the arts and the media. The editor who takes credit for the LRB's success must also take responsibility for its bigotry.