Times Literary Supplement

Where curious minds meet

"Verging sometimes on the catalogue, of personal relations and environments, uninspired by any glimpse beyond them and untouched by any genuine rush of feeling” was the TLS’s verdict on T. S. Eliot’s poetry, in the early years of last century. So far from taking it personally, Eliot responded by writing some of his most famous critical essays for the paper, in the 1920s, when TLS readers were also treated to the stylish reviews written by another of its legendary Editor, Bruce Richmond’s discoveries: a “clever young woman” called Virginia Woolf.

Times have changed and so has the TLS, but not the quality of its writers. They come from the world-wide republic of letters, and in the past thirty years alone, high points have included essays, reviews and poems by Italo Calvino, Mavis Gallant, Patricia Highsmith, Milan Kundera, Philip Larkin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Joseph Brodsky, Gore Vidal, Juan Goytisolo, Christopher Hitchens, Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.

Internationally renowned scholars such as Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Claude Rawson rub shoulders in our pages with front-rank novelists such as A. S. Byatt, Ali Smith and Joyce Carol Oates; the acclaimed biographers, Hermione Lee, Graham Robb, Jonathan Bate and Roy Foster with heavy-hitting philosophers Thomas Nagel, Daniel Dennett and Martha Nussbaum. Groundbreaking scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Tim Flannery make the extraordinary accessible alongside the discoveries of the explorers Redmond O’Hanlon and Robin Hanbury-Tenison. Stefan Collini, Edmund White, Elaine Showalter, Clive James – whom more than one reader has dubbed “the Montaigne of our day” – and A. N. Wilson bring authority and wit and a welcome touch of waspishness to everything they write, not least in the TLS, where they make regular appearances.

The TLS may not always have got it right – see, for example, some of the spectacular misjudgements of earlier years, on Eliot’s Prufrock, or Joyce’s Ulysses. But the hits are much more spectacular than the misses. In the course of its history the paper has earned an unrivalled reputation for intellectual rigour, impartiality – and curiosity: a reputation it keeps to this day.

Reviewing the books that matter, examining the questions central to our culture, the Lit Supp, as it has been known to generations of readers, provides a unique record of developments in literature, politics, scholarship and the arts, and brings a unique seriousness to bear on the major intellectual debates of our time. The TLS is the only literary weekly – in fact the only journal – to offer comprehensive coverage not just of the latest and most important publications, in every subject, in several languages – but also current theatre, opera, exhibitions and film.

And every week, readers of the TLS will find (as well as new poems, occasional short stories and regular columns such as Hugo Williams’s much-loved – and sometimes hated – “Freelance”) some two-dozen detailed reviews of new books in a wide range of subjects.

If you care about the life of the mind, you will certainly find it indispensable.