Sir John Collings Squire (2 April 1884 – 20 December 1958) was an English writer, most notable as editor of the London Mercury, a major literary magazine in the interwar period.

Squire had been appointed literary editor when the New Statesman was set up in 1912;[3] he was noted as an adept and quick journalist, at ease with contributing to all parts of the journal.

[6] When the war ended he found himself with a network of friends and backers, controlling a substantial part of London's literary press.

Alec Waugh described the elements of Squire's 'hegemony' as acquired largely by accident, consequent on his rejection for military service for bad sight.

Squire's natural persona was of a beer-drinking, cricketing West Countryman; his literary cricket XI, the Invalids (originally made up of men who had been wounded in the First World War),[8] were immortalised in A. G. Macdonell's England, Their England,[9] with Squire as Mr. William Hodge, editor of the London Weekly.

His third son Maurice was killed in the Second War while his youngest daughter Julia Baker (née Squire) was a costume designer for theatre and cinema.

[19] It was a dining club with invited speakers, and was closely connected to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, which nominated members.

Many of them, such as Virginia Woolf, found him coarse; they thought, with reason, that he drank too much; they had little confidence in the group, known as the Squirearchy, which surrounded him.In a fairly recent study, the academic Leonard Diepeveen explored the particularly strained relationship between Squire and literary Modernists: Virginia Woolf wrote that Squire was "more repulsive than words can express, and malignant into the bargain".

[28] A reappraisal of the periodical network of early twentieth-century literary London, and problems with the term modernism, have encouraged scholars to cast their nets beyond the traditional venue of modernism – the little magazine – to seek to better understand the role mass-market periodicals such as the London Mercury played in promoting new and progressive writers.