Why go on? What’s the point of it all? Have faith, says FQR’s editorial director, Nick Foulkes—there is method in our madness.

I have never really understood that very wonderful American expression “the world is going to hell in a handbasket”. But I have a suspicion that what is happening right now is a pretty good definition of heading to Hades in a shopping trolley.

The world is heating up so fast that polar bears are going to need bikinis. It must be true because chunky ex-vice president Al Gore spends most of his life crisscrossing the globe (doubtless in special non-polluting aeroplanes) with his entourage, picking up fat fees to tell us so. And yet the snow this year for skiing has been great. Oil prices are high but the charter fees for yachts are even higher, and these days it is not the director’s parking space that is the crucible of corporate envy, rather the landing strip of the nearest private airfield. The continent of Africa appears to be continuing to slide towards chaos and endemic destitution, yet this summer, just a few hundred miles north in the Mediterranean, you, me and the rest of the people reading this will be fighting poverty in our own way, on beaches and in the fleshpots of Marbella, Porto Cervo and St Tropez.

As we anticipate the final Götterdämmerung, doing our best impressions of Nero (any man who makes his horse a senator would have a chuckle at the state of political life today), along comes Finch’s Quarterly Review, riding in like some well-dressed, well-informed and well-fed Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.

Finch’s Quarterly Review was born out of a discussion between me and the eponymous proprietor last autumn. Charles said he fancied doing a magazine and, as I like Charles, I decided to humour him. Given that Charles has at least 107 ideas a day, at least three or four of which are quite good, I thought it would be forgotten.

It wasn’t.

That may have been a bad thing—we will see—but here it is. I see Finch’s Quarterly Review as charming and none too serious; Charles sees it as a bold new direction in media, a unique mix of wit, style and sleb-ridee. (Moreover, he has got frightfully excited about Finch on the internet, which, for all I know may be where you are reading this.)

I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. Finch’s Quarterly Review offers a unique look at the world through the distorting lens of Charles’s folding Persol sunglasses—and, because of that, I reckon a good number of people will detest it on principle. However, I like Charles, which is a surprise, as on paper I shouldn’t really like him either. He is too like me. About the only difference between us is that I have much better clothes than he does, while he has many more famous friends, quite a few of whom have consented to write, draw, photograph or be photographed for Finch’s Quarterly Review. As to the rest, there is not a lot to tell us apart, from our Smythson diaries via our Montblanc pens and vintage 1960s Plexiglas Rolexes to our Charvet shirts. That is another thing about Finch’s Quarterly Review: as well as a fair bit of Charles Finch and chums there will be a lot of brands, some of them in here because they are represented by Finch & Partners, some of them because we like them.

But even though we may look it, we are not totally vacuous frivolous sybarites, at least not all the time. Believe it or not, we care; so as well as the froth, the fun and the Finch, we also know that there are many less fortunate than you, gentle reader. By allowing people such as Jason McCue to tell us why he and his friend George Clooney are making a difference in Darfur in these pages (along with details of where you can send your donation), we hope that, as well as amusing you, Finch’s Quarterly Review will help ease your guilty conscience just a little bit.

During the 1960s there was a wonderfully cynical film called Nothing But the Best. Made in 1964, it does not star Charles’s father, Peter Finch, but Alan Bates. (Interestingly enough, Bates was supposed to have taken the role of the gay doctor in Sunday Bloody Sunday that got Charles’s dad into a Brokeback Mountain situation). In Nothing But the Best Bates plays an ambitious young man on the make; at the beginning of the film he gives voice to one life’s eternal truths: “Face it, it’s a filthy stinking world, but there are some smashing things in it.” If anything, this epigrammatic observation is more accurate today than it was 44 years ago. In fact, we like it so much that we have made it our motto. But given that we are wildly pretentious, we have translated it into Latin. It is a while since I last looked at my Cambridge Latin course textbooks, but my man with the Latin phrase book translates it as “Visio is, suus a spurcus foetidus universitas, tamen illic es nonnullus smashing res in is”—as I am pretty sure they didn’t say on the way to Forum.

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