Contributors have included Antony Flew, Christie Davies, Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Václav Havel, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Norman Stone, Theodore Dalrymple, Roger Watson and Peter Mullen.

In The Spectator of 21 September 2002 Scruton wrote an article, "My Life Beyond the Pale", in which he explained what he saw as the difficulties "of finding people to write in an explicitly conservative journal".

He noted that finding subscribers was initially difficult, and that Maurice Cowling had told him that to "try to encapsulate [conservatism] in a philosophy was the kind of quaint project that Americans might undertake".

He also wrote that the editorship A controversy involving Ray Honeyford, headmaster of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, Yorkshire, gave The Salisbury Review much publicity in 1984.

The 1984 Salisbury Review article "Education and Race — an Alternative View"[1] covered similar ground, but caused a national outcry.