“It was a monarchy, and I think perhaps it will be a slightly more democratic operation,” Buruma said. “Certainly I think I’ll be more collaborative. One great strength of The Review at the moment is that it has a number of very, very bright young editors who know more about certain things than I do.”

Buruma said he was most daunted by the shift from “thinking of the world as a writer — which is a rather self-centered way of looking at the world. That’s a very different mind-set from finding other people to do things, improving their thinking, helping them.”

Hederman said he “didn’t have any trepidation at all” about Buruma’s relative lack of editing experience. “As a writer, Ian was thoughtful about editing. He paid attention to the way his pieces were edited by Bob and others. He had strong feelings about the kind of editing he liked and didn’t like.”

Hederman said Silvers thought of Buruma as a possible editor of The Review, but Hederman and others also said that Silvers never expressed strong opinions about what should happen after his tenure. Silvers, like many who observed him, seemed to believe he would be in his perch forever.

Buruma intends to feature a more unpredictable ideological roster, given the unprecedented nature of the country’s political climate.

“We’re not living in the same time as Nixon or Clinton or Bush,” he said. “Under Trump, the distinctions that used to exist, roughly speaking, between left and right, have become much more fluid. People who may never have come within a mile of the pages of The Review 20 years ago might have a place in it now. Everything will be looked at with fresh eyes.”

“It’s kind of like being put in charge of the Parthenon,” Sam Tanenhaus, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review and a contributor to The New York Review, said. “If you change one little figure on the frieze, it will be seen as earthshaking by the people who watch it so closely every day.”