History
The TLS first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to The Times, but became a separate publication in 1914. Many distinguished writers have been contributors, including T. S. Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, but reviews were normally anonymous until 1974, during which year signed reviews were gradually introduced under the editorship of John Gross.
This aroused great controversy at the time. “Anonymity had once been appropriate when it was a general rule at other publications, but it had ceased to be so,” Gross said. “In addition I personally felt that reviewers ought to take responsibility for their opinions.”
Martin Amis was a member of the editorial staff early in his career. Philip Larkin's poem Aubade, effectively his final poetic work, was first published in the Christmas-week issue of the TLS in 1977. While it has long been regarded as one of the world's pre-eminent critical publications, its history is not without gaffes. For instance, the publication missed James Joyce entirely and only commented negatively on Lucian Freud from 1945 until 1978, when a portrait of his appeared on the cover.
The TLS cooperates closely with The Times; its online version is hosted on the Times website, and its editorial offices are based in Times House, Pennington Street, London. The current editor is Peter Stothard, a former editor of The Times itself. He succeeded Ferdinand Mount in 2003.
In recent decades, the TLS has included essays, reviews and poems by John Ashbery, Italo Calvino, Patricia Highsmith, Milan Kundera, Philip Larkin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Joseph Brodsky, Gore Vidal, Orhan Pamuk, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, among others.
Many writers have described the publication as indispensable. For example, prize-winning Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa said: “I have been reading the TLS since I learned English 40 years ago. It is the most serious, authoritative, witty, diverse and stimulating cultural publication in all the five languages I speak.”
Read more about this topic: The Times Literary Supplement
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“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
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