The economic slump that followed the First World War had its effects both on the Times Literary Supplement and on the rest of the publishing world. Books with titles like Britain’s Economic Plight, England’s Crisis and Facts and Figures about the Crisis poured in for review throughout the 1920s and 30s, as did those which offered one or other of the extreme political solutions which were being tried out in Europe in those years. Meanwhile, the depression had a direct impact on the TLS’s sales, which by the early 1920s had almost halved by comparison with their highest wartime level of over 40,000.

The owner of The Times, Lord Northcliffe, had never been enthusiastic about what he saw as the excessively arty and intellectual Supplement and in 1922 he decided that the twenty-year-old experiment should end. On 30 March, the TLS was to carry an announcement saying that it would cease publication two weeks later. The story goes that, whether by chance or skilful under-management, it was noticed at a late stage that not every department had received this instruction. By the time the paper was going to press, various people had gone home and it was impossible to confirm the announcement’s authority, so it was prudently pulled out. Northcliffe had other preoccupations and was ill, the stay of execution continued and in August he died. The TLS survived him and Bruce Richmond remained as editor for a further fifteen years.

The editorial challenge, as for any journal that hopes to survive beyond a decade or two, was to build on the paper’s strengths, bringing in new writers without losing the best of the original ones and responding constructively to cultural change while maintaining what were seen as indispensable values. Of course, many of the books reviewed in the TLS, then as now, were in one way or another historical. In particular, editions and studies of writers of the past represented a central aspect of the paper’s coverage. But Richmond and his staff also had to take decisions about books on pressing contemporary political and social issues, and about the work of new writers in a period when literary modernism reached its peak and younger authors with different concerns began to dominate the publishers’ lists. Forty years later, it was said of the New Statesman that it was radical in politics but conservative in its view of literature. Broadly speaking, the opposite was true of the TLS in the 1920s and 30s.