Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement [Hardcover]

Derwent May (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2001

A comprehensive and entertaining history of the Times Literary Supplement, this text is not only a "biography" of an institution, but it is a reflection of the changes in British literature and culture throughout the 20th century. From its first tenuous year in 1902 to its modern-day incarnation, the Times Literary Supplement has been home to an astonishing assemblage of outstanding writers. This work also reveals for the first time the identities of the journal's anonymous reviewers since 1902—a tradition which lasted until 1974. Derwent May, formerly of the TLS himself, also examines the ethos and aims of the paper's editors, management, and staff; and the controversies, quarrels, and relations between writers and critics.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Entering its centennial year, the Times Literary Supplement, that British bastion of highbrow book culture, has a circulation of just 35,000. So it should not surprise anyone if a 600-page, painstakingly thorough history of the supplement generates sales somewhat more meager than that. This is something of a shame, for despite its wrist-cracking bulk and geological pace, this volume is stylishly written, affectionate and more entertaining than it has any right to be. May, a TLS contributor and longtime Times man, closely chronicles the supplement's tenuous start (it was originally issued to cover book reviews squeezed out of the regular Times by parliamentary reports) and frequent financial crises the TLS would inevitably be rescued in the nick of time by one high-minded millionaire or another. May faithfully traces the rise of such famous contributors as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, freed by anonymity (there were no bylines in those days) to write searingly vivid critiques. (Of one unlucky title Woolf wrote, "You draw from it that sense of instruction in unimportant matters which you get by looking from the train window at a flat stretch of countryside.") May is equally good following the uncertain early fate of works destined for immortality, like The Waste Land and Ulysses. The correspondence of hawk-eyed TLS subscribers, pouncing on errors in translations of Catullus, will delight those with a taste for the absurd. It is hard to imagine any but the most stout-hearted TLS reader undertaking this long journey from cover to cover, but American literary scholars will likely treasure this heroic record of a periodical that took the life of the mind more seriously than most. Illus.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Novelist and essayist May served only briefly on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), but his tenure on the British literary scene qualifies him amply for the task of chronicling the supplement's first century. One can easily imagine many versions of this history, with each person associated with the TLS focusing, like the blind men describing the elephant, on particular events or personalities. May has done an admirable job of conveying the whole elephant, as it were, while enlivening the rigorously researched text with insightful character sketches, anecdotes, and many excerpts from reviews (e.g., Andrew Lang's dismissal of the Baskerville hound as "only a big dog on whom taxes are paid" and an assessment of The Wind in the Willows that "as a contribution to natural history the work is negligible"). Although the book will appeal mainly to scholars, May's crisp style makes it a pleasure to read. Highly recommended for academic and large public libraries. Susan M. Colowick, North Olympic Lib. Syst., Port Angeles, WA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 584 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK; First edition. edition (November 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007114494
• ISBN-13: 978-0007114498
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,736,372 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thorough, August 12, 2002

By 

Judith C. Kinney (Westerville, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (Hardcover)

I love books about books, and this is a book that is about a newspaper that is about books. Derwent May has written a 550-page tome (not including index and bibliography) tracing the 100-year history of the Times (of London) Literary Supplement. I once had a trial subscription to the TLS and enjoyed reading it but couldn't afford the subscription price. The best comparable thing we have in the U.S. is the New York Review of Books. (The NYRB, though it's less expensive, gives you only 20 issues a year while the TLS gives you 52.) The London Review of Books is not a good substitute: Fewer than half its pages are devoted to actual book reviews, and this periodical has the annoying habit of not following any rules for breaking words at the ends of lines. The New York Times Book Review is unsatisfactory because the reviews are too short. The New Republic is a good read if you want some politics and current events along with your book reviews. Amazon.com is a great place to get book reviews if you want the opinions of John and Mary Doe. But I digress.

May divides his book into convenient time periods. For each time period, he first discusses the people who were employed by the TLS, the format and format changes of the TLS during the period, and then the reviewers and important books reviewed. This last is the best part of each chapter, although the other parts are also interesting.

Two sections of photos show TLS personnel and reviewers and four photos of the TLS itself as its format changed over the years. I would have liked to see more photos of the paper itself.

The index could have been expanded to include the titles of books reviewed. One can't look up a favorite book to see if it was reviewed (and what was said about it) in the TLS.

On the whole, CRITICAL TIMES is a thoroughly enjoyable read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It bestrode the narrow world of learning like a colossus, September 30, 2003

By 

Scott Lahti (North Berwick, Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (Hardcover)

(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, sustaining a creative tension in printing reviews by critics who often found themselves knocked off their pedestals a few pages later in the same issue. Its editors had long excelled in translating into readability the prose of reviewers who, whatever their expertise and rigor across their diverse specialties, may have lacked the gift of smooth expression, ensuring that at the very least, contentious readers of varied allegiances would always emerge better informed as to the currents of thought swirling about them, having seen friend and foe alike at their Sunday best. Many of the most incisive TLS critiques of the new literary theorists in recent years have come from such up-to-date humanists of the left as the French-Bulgarian critic Tzvetan Todorov, who argued powerfully in a 1985 review that their epistemological nihilism and hermetic manner of expresssion tended unavoidably to render their ostensibly leftist political aspirations impotent in a world outside where genocide and poverty speak in voices of blinding clarity.

Small wonder, then, that a country known at its historic best for its sense of fair play and empirical common sense, and a capital which long served as the crossroads of the global trade in ideas, should have spawned the finest and most comprehensive intellectual weekly in the world's dominant language. In the photo section of his admirable tour of the hundred-year horizon of The Times Literary Supplement, Derwent May includes that most unmistakable imprimatur of cultural arrival, a cartoon from The New Yorker. It provides as fitting a cameo as any of the paper's character: A well-to-do matron, lady friend in tow, strolls past the booklined den in which her husband sits engrossed in a prize volume, nursing an aperitif. "It all started with that trial subscription to the TLS. Then came that Nigel Nicolson book, the smoking jacket and pipe, the pint of bitter, and, bingo, little West Tenth Street has become Bloomsbury."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If the TLS did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it, September 26, 2003

By 

Scott Lahti (North Berwick, Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (Hardcover)

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 editorial independence and forgiving its tendency to hover always, in the words of present editor Ferdinand Mount, "on the edge of profitability."

For its first seventy-two years, its contributors appeared unsigned - a holdover from a Victorian practice used by leading periodicals to convey a unified institutional authority - but knowing speculation over the identity of those penning its most biting scholarly critiques raged at all times among the tightly-knit ranks of English letters, spilling over into sly references in its contentious letters columns, which for decades have served historians, critics, philosophers and aggrieved authors alike as a sort of Internet avant la lettre, as they debate everything from the precise dating of Wordsworth manuscripts to the social roots of the English Civil War, weeks without end. In its dawning years, genteel Edwardian bookmen and classically-trained Etonians soon shared column space with such ascending lights of the modernist wave as Virginia Woolf and the young T.S. Eliot, who exclaimed to his mother "this is the highest honour possible in the critical world of literature." As their eminence grew and they came to publish many of their finest and most innovative essays therein, the Lit Supp, as it was then called, granted such arrived stars premiums over and above its famously stingy fees - which for decades were calibrated with a special pounds-per-column-inch ruler. Unlike the dozens of twentieth-century literary journals which have soared and crashed in its wake, wedded as they were to one or another movement, tendency or cultural moment whose days soon enough passed, the TLS has always sustained a refreshing independence from all trace of sectarian tendency, a steadfastly uncliquish refusal to play favorites in its reviewing of books, whether in the spheres of culture or politics - unlike its latter-day cross-Atlantic rivals The New York Review of Books, the home of Lincoln Center left-liberalism, or the London Review of Books, with its high-left Hampstead hauteur. While this "eclectic hospitality", in Mount's phrase, has made it a more-accurate cross-section of the true balance of forces in the world of ideas, a more complete and refreshing diet for the mind, ensuring its longevity, it has led on occasion to what must always appear in hindsight an unavoidable provinciality in time, that hit-or-miss note in contemporary reception which is inseparable from the rise and fall of literary reputation. The paper missed the boat on Ulysses and the early work of D.H. Lawrence, but found offsetting strengths in its glowingly perceptive reviews throughout the 1920s, by one Mme. Duclaux, of the successive installments of Marcel Proust's mammoth cycle A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, arguably the great 20th-century novel. Evelyn Waugh, though, was compelled upon the appearance of his first-reviewed book to write in sardonic correction, having seen himself described as "Miss Waugh," while Kenneth Grahame's children's classic The Wind in the Willows found itself evaluated by E.V. Lucas thus: "As a contribution to natural history the work is negligible." (Part I of II of review)