Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1752250 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 606 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Derwent May's centenary history of the Times Literary Supplement: Critical Times: The History of The Times Literary Supplement signifies its importance (and its self-importance). For a hundred years the Times Literary Supplement has enjoyed a pre-eminent status among highbrow writers and reviewers in the UK. For 75 years of its history, the TLS published mostly anonymous reviews, "coming out", as May puts it, only when the pressure for transparency became impossible to resist. However, a database of all the paper's reviewers--anonymous and signed--has now been created, although May has used the paper's own records of contributors for his chronological study of the paper. The result is somewhat disappointing. Instead of a behind-the-scenes look at the mechanics of one of the most influential papers around, we get a year-by-year resumé of who said what about whom. Readers wondering about how books were selected for review, or about the relationship between the TLS and commercial publishers, or readers simply wanting a quantitative survey of the changing subject-matter of the review, will have to look elsewhere or do the research themselves, via the database. Although the great and the good of the literary scene are all here-"Q", Woolf, Eliot, Amis major and minor, Berlin, etc--and most of the famous academic skirmishes get good coverage (communism, science vs. culture, post-structuralism), the book is too list-like a treatment. This is very much a history of the TLS by the TLS and for the TLS, and the main joy for many in reading it will be to see whether they get a mention. --Miles Taylor.

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.