Among the most prolific of those who first began writing for the TLS in this period was Marjorie Grant Cook, who reviewed more than 1200 books in the 1920s and 30s, including work by many of the leading women writers of the day both in Britain and the USA. Cook was an early advocate of Willa Cather, wrote discriminatingly about the first novels of Rosamond Lehmann, and also reviewed books by Radclyffe Hall, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Wharton and Rebecca West. Her tastes were catholic: she also covered the work of popular authors such as Richmal Crompton and May Sinclair, and was the person who introduced Tolkien’s The Hobbit – ‘one long enchantment’ – to readers of the TLS.

The work of other influential critics of new writing, among them Edgell Rickword and Alex Glendinning, and the important political contributions of E. H. Carr, H. M. Stannard and Geoffrey West, are discussed in the separate sections on literary and political coverage. Other very frequent reviewers included the poets Edmund Blunden and Austin Clarke, the novelists Charles Morgan and Angela Thirkell, the historian Denis Brogan and the economist Douglas Jay. More than 1100 books were reviewed in this period by the assistant editor and subsequently editor of the TLS, D. L. Murray. His wife, Leonora Eyles, was also a contributor, as was her son-in-law, Mario Praz.

Twenty-two of the books on the First World War published in the period were reviewed by Archibald (later Field-Marshall Lord) Wavell. The traveller Cicely Fox Smith wrote often on the sea, whaling and kindred topics. Among other specialist reviewers was the fishing champion William Radcliffe, whose 1921 book Fishing from the Earliest Times prompted one of the longest correspondences in the TLS’s history. Some books of Russian poetry, especially by Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok, were reviewed by Prince Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who died in prison in Siberia in 1939. New contributors also included the anthropologist Sir James Frazer; the travel writer Peter Fleming; the poet Ivor Gurney, who wrote lucidly on Cotswold dramas for the TLS before his breakdown; Margaret Cole, the Fabian and co-author with her husband G. D. H. Cole of detective stories; the naval adventure author ‘Taffrail’ (Commander Dorling); Margery Perham, a distinguished scholar of race relations in the last years of the British Empire; Dilys Powell, who was to become film critic of the Sunday Times; C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, the authorised translator of Proust and Pirandello; the military historian Basil Liddell-Hart; the landscape gardener Brenda Colvin; the historian A. L. Rowse; the surgeon and bibliographer Geoffrey Keynes; and a host of literary historians, critics and essayists. The bibliographer Stanley Morison, who was to be editor of the TLS for a brief spell in the 1940s, first contributed in 1931; Storm Jameson, who was to be a key influence during the Second World War, in 1938. Occasional or single pieces were written by Kenneth Clark (on Michelangelo), Edward Gordon Craig (including one on Inigo Jones), C. S. Forester, E. M. Forster (on Jane Austen’s letters), C. S. Lewis, G. E. Moore, J. B. Priestley, John Rothenstein, Vita Sackville-West, George Saintsbury, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freya Stark and J. R. R. Tolkien.