Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement

This voluminous work serves as a both a fascinating history of this most reputable literary magazine in the English language and as an indispensable reference work. It is filled with interesting information on the authors, the books and the literary concerns of a century. The TLS was founded in 1902; editor Bruce Richmond established its position as the foremost literary/intellectual publication for English literary discourse in the years 1903 to 1937. Richmond believed that the TLS was for keen general readers and that its role was to help readers find the most worthwhile books. Not all of its editors were drawn from Oxbridge circles, since Stanley Morrison (1945 - 1947) started out as typesetter, whilst Arthur Crook (1959 - 1974) began his career as a postal clerk. With some notable exceptions, the talents of gifted writers were recognized early by the TLS: Philip Larkin, Graham Greene, Saul Bellow and Proust. The delicious polemics always added spice to the pages of TLS and the reader can get lost in the obscure and famous quarrels and outrageous observations of a variety of colourful literary figures. One hundred years of books, authors, editors and literary squabbles, who could ask for more? Critical Times is a landmark of English literary history and a must-have reference work.

(Part II of II of review) With the accession after the Second World War of editor Alan Pryce-Jones, a social hummingbird of wide artistic interests and cosmopolitan friendships, the TLS began a broadening of its Continental and American exposure which continues to this day (Pryce-Jones pioneered in bringing to light, in English and German at once, the major work of the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities). The unceasing debates in its pages engaged a now-venerated mid-century generation of historians (A.J.P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper), philosophers (Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire), critics (William Empson, F.R. Leavis), novelists (Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis), and poets (Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas), whose struggles to reshape their respective domains in the shadow of a European landscape fractured in the aftermath of the Nazi and Stalinist catastrophes, and a Britain shrunken in colonial power and wealth alike in the wake of the "American century" of the Cold War era, traced the contours of English intellectual life for decades to come. The most widely-remarked blind spot in the paper's coverage of political books, its regular assignment of Russian studies to the Cambridge don E.H. Carr, a historical determinist and "wave-of-the-future" cheerleader for the mammoth collectivising feats of Stalinist Russia, never lacked for opposition on the letters page, while dissenting Russianists along the periphery helped sustain its both-sides-now balance. By the late 1970s, though, the TLS had caught up fully with history, in the world of peril outside and in the academy, and many of the dissenters - Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, Martin Malia, Adam Ulam, Leopold Labedz, Leonard Schapiro - became the eventual "old hands" within, restoring to full scholarly view the aggressive, ideological character of successive Soviet regimes - with left-leaning Cold War "structuralists" and "revisionists" taking their turn at the margins.The debates over contributorial anonymity, a practice long defended by T.S. Eliot as a brake on egoistic self-indulgence by reviewers, and attacked alike as an evasion of accountability before the need to judge the credentials of the reviewer, ended in 1974 with the appearance of literary scholar John Gross as editor, who retired the practice to little dispute. With the mushrooming of academic literary studies since the 1960s, the TLS, with its twin missions to bridge the worlds of the specialist and the curious amateur, to bestride the narrow world of learning like a colossus, was forced to confront the parallel rise of literary theory, the often highly abstract, largely French-inspired host of interpretative techniques whose self-proclaimed "decentering" and "subversion" of traditional approaches to literature baffled and alienated much of the older literate public outside the green quadrangles of the campus. Here again, its "eclectic hospitality" saved it from the threat of suffocation by either side, sustainin

Like the classic pre-First World War Eleventh Edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which it is in spirit a weekly high-journalistic descendant, The Times Literary Supplement of London is among those prime artifacts of the British Empire of the mind which, if they did not exist, we would find it necessary to invent. The TLS, as it is known to its small but influential audience - its circulation has seldom risen above 40,000 - throughout the Anglophone realm, has, thanks to a rigorously scholarly editorial and advertising policy we might label "highest-common-denominator", combined with a topical range approaching each week almost that of the old Britannica itself, secured a reputation over its first hundred years as the most authoritative general book review in English, a sort of Recording Angel of contemporary intellectual life.As vital and relevant as ever on its hundredth anniversary, the paper that has been called "the mailbox of the British intelligentsia" and "the booklover's journal of record" has authorised former staffer and veteran English literary editor Derwent May to play Ancient Mariner among its editorial archives, and in Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement, he has done the centenarian weekly proud, with a panoramic and lucidly-written remembrance of the central literary, intellectual and ideological events of the century past, as seen through the eyes of writers and critics whose work was commissioned from, and in turn broadcast from, the city which was until quite recently the confident pivot of a global empire whose scholars, no less than its consuls, had blanketed the globe. May's work is faithfully descriptive and chronological throughout, with little evaluation or cultural-historical comparative analysis to frame it, but its ideal readers, those with a strong prior interest in the personalities and works it portrays, will discern several keys by its end which help unlock the mystique surrounding the TLS.By 1902, the year of the journal's birth, its parent newspaper, the venerable Times of London, had long distinguished itself by its exhaustive coverage of both Parliament and such far-flung imperial dramas as the Crimean War, its correspondents often scooping by days the inner circle of the governing class for whom its vast and stately columns provided an almost-official daily ritual. The space constraints resulting vied with the rising worldwide flood of new books to be reviewed, and the TLS was launched separately to fill the breach. With the temporary exception of its early owner Lord Northcliffe, whose attempts just before his death to dumb it down in the interests of circulation and profit came to naught under the unyielding highmindedness of those early editors he christened "the Monks of Printing House Square," its half-dozen or so press-baron proprietors - present chief Rupert Murdoch included - have to their enduring credit treated it much like a prize literary orchid, granting it full

Founded in 1902, the TLS has sought to present the whole range of publishing and writing. Many of its contributors have shown great scholarship, imagination and independence of mind. May recalls that it has given us reviews of and by the 20th century's pre-eminent novelists writing in English, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Recently it has opposed Critical Theory, and exposed the charlatans Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.But May also shows us the TLS's bad traits of `gossip and gentility', the baleful effects of Eton, Oxford and clubbable `literary London'. So it has all too often been a fashion victim, persistently overrating very minor novelists, like Kingsley Amis and George Orwell. May himself does not mention Tony Harrison, our greatest living poet, or Penelope Fitzgerald, possibly our finest recent novelist. The TLS also helped to inflate the reputations of idealist thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Noam Chomsky, Terry Eagleton and Roger Scruton. May, like many of his subjects, often uses words to avoid judgement, to veil, not reveal, reality. For instance, he notes of Paul de Man, the Yale Professor who founded `deconstructionism' in the USA, that some of his work was `judged to be fascist in character', but he does not explain why. De Man wrote 104 articles for pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic newspapers in Belgium during World War Two! All too often the TLS propounded the conventional Cold War pieties, without seriously examining the rational kernel of Communism. Consequently, the study of literature substituted for intelligent politics; literary squabbles were given more attention than genuine conflicts of interest.The TLS is now edited by Ferdinand Mount, "educated, like so many of the earlier figures on the Literary Supplement, at Eton and Christ Church." He became the Daily Mail's chief leader writer, then head of Thatcher's Policy Unit, and more recently a political columnist on the Daily Telegraph. So don't expect much TLS criticism of the present conservative government!

This history of "The Times" literary supplement will delight any interested in learning about the supplement's evolution and years of controversy and humor. From the identities and approaches of hundreds of figures who reviewed for the paper to the controversies which it aroused, Critical Times is a weighty survey and includes many reflections on British and literary history along the way.