Because of the still striking modern-ness of literary modernism, it can be easy to forget quite how distant the 1920s are. Hardy, Shaw, Conrad and Housman – all of them born between 1840 and 1860 - were not only alive but still publishing then, and all of them contributed to the TLS, albeit for the most part in the form of published letters. The team of reviewers which Richmond had built up since 1902 was of a younger generation but no longer the youngest, and its remoteness from new authors sometimes showed. However well-known Evelyn Waugh was among his large circle, to the author of the TLS’s short note on his first book he was no more than ‘Miss Waugh’. And for all the commitment to new writing represented by the Hogarth Press, Virginia Woolf was to conclude that the 1930s generation was incapable of producing great literature.

Woolf wrote the bulk of her TLS pieces in the journal’s first two decades but there were many still to come – on the Brontës, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Hardy and Conrad, and on essayists like Montaigne, Browne and Hazlitt. T. S. Eliot’s contributions had begun more recently. The first of his substantial pieces, on Ben Jonson, appeared in 1919 (‘I have been asked to write for the Times Literary Supplement – to write the Leading Article from time to time,’ he told his mother in a letter on 2 October. ‘This is the highest honour possible in the critical world of literature.’) It was followed in the 1920s and 30s by his essays on Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and on Metaphysical poets, as well as important pieces on a range of other subjects including the influence of Ovid, ‘Creative Criticism’, Wilkie Collins and Dickens, on Julien Benda’s influential book La Trahison des Clercs and on the French philosopher and Catholic convert Jacques Maritain.

Meanwhile, of course, both writers were themselves the subjects of reviews. Being a contributor to the TLS has rarely won any editorial favours there but the qualities of Woolf’s novels were always recognized by the journal’s reviewers, principal among them the prolific Harold Child and A. S. McDowall, regular contributors since 1902. McDowall’s 1925 review of Mrs Dalloway is notable for making a comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses, which the paper failed, or refused, to review until the publication ban was lifted in 1937. ‘Mrs Woolf’s vision … produces something of her own’, McDowall wrote. ‘People and events here have a peculiar, almost ethereal transparency, as though bathed in a medium where one thing permeates another. Undoubtedly our world is less solid than it was, and our novels may have to shake themselves a little free…. Here, Mrs Woolf seems to say, is the stream of life, but reflected always in a mental vision.’

Eliot was less fortunate in the reception of his poetry by the TLS, though the paper’s criticisms of The Waste Land were a matter of substantive critical disagreement, not – as has sometimes been suggested - of mere blindness to the poem’s qualities. The reviewer was Edgell Rickword, a poet and critic then in his mid 20s, who was to become a powerful literary figure on the Left (and an influence on F. R. Leavis). He wrote for the TLS almost every week between the autumn of 1921 and 1925, when he began the important but short-lived periodical The Calendar of Modern Letters. A list of Rickword’s pieces is a roll-call of significant publications: Elizabeth Bowen’s first book of short stories, the first novels of Carl van Vechten and Liam O’Flaherty, first volumes of poetry by Roy Campbell and Edwin Muir, work by other young writers including Vera Brittain, John Dos Passos, David Garnett, Robert Graves and Alec Waugh, as well as new books by established figures as diverse as Valéry, Saki and Arnold Bennett. His verdict on The Waste Land, which appeared on the opposite page from an appreciative review by McDowall of Lawrence’s Kangaroo (‘a fine book: experimental, masterful, challenging the rules and his readers’), recognised - and illustrated – both the poem’s sophistication and allusiveness and how its methods could be theoretically justified. Ultimately, though, it judged it an unsatisfying and somewhat exclusive experiment which, by its unwillingness to allow the reader ‘a direct emotional response’, had taken Eliot in a wrong direction.

Rickword was one of several young critics published by the TLS in this period whose reviews brought to attention original work which otherwise might have taken much longer to break through. Both Joyce, despite the lacuna over Ulysses, and Ezra Pound, despite his claims to the contrary, had been scrupulously and for the most part favourably reviewed from early on and fragments of Finnegans Wake were painstakingly elucidated in the 1930s by Alex Glendinning, who also wrote favourably and with insight about Leavis’s early criticism, among other topics. Users of the ‘TLS’ Centenary Archive will want to pursue their own examples but Faulkner, Lorca and Hemingway provide three interesting cases. The prolific Orlo Williams reviewed the first half-dozen of Faulkner’s books published in England, beginning with a single-column piece which left no one in any doubt about Soldier’s Pay: Faulkner had ‘a fertile invention,’ he wrote, ‘a power of illustrating and differentiating character, a force in depicting both tragic and comic incident and a nostalgic sense of … poetry’. Among other pieces by Williams are a sympathetic but far from uncritical account of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and a favourable review of Stephen Spender’s 1935 book of essays The Destructive Element: ‘New winds are beginning to blow through English literature, and in a book like this one begins to feel their refreshing force’. (Spender’s poetry was greeted more equivocally, George Buchanan pointing out that in Vienna ‘We are led … not only to pity … but also to a view of the poet himself in the act of being pitiful. This poem reveals that Mr Spender’s charm … the readiness of his sympathetic response … is also his danger.’)

In the case of Lorca, Canciones (1927) was reviewed by the first critic outside Spain to have written about the poet, J. B. Trend. And it was a letter from Trend to the TLS, published in October 1936, which first told the world the truth about Lorca’s murder: ‘The circumstances of the arrest,’ Trend wrote, ‘the trumped-up charge, and the barbarous detail of the burning of books of verse show what the attitude of the military-clerical reaction in Spain is likely to be towards literature and art.’

By one of those chains of association which the TLS index is full of, another book of Lorca’s, Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, leads one back to Hemingway’s bullfighting classic, Death in the Afternoon. Hemingway’s novels were well received in the TLS, especially by Orlo Williams, who described A Farewell to Arms as ‘a novel of great power’ and wrote vividly about its author’s ‘keen but selective vision, his dismal animation, his unrationalized pessimism’. The review of Death in the Afternoon was more specialised. Its author, who was the book illustrator John Kettelwell, pointed out that the publisher’s claim that this was the first book in English on bullfighting was wrong: there had been three others, published in 1683, 1852 and 1928. A connoisseurial discussion of Hemingway’s account of the sport followed, praising his visual description but criticizing his prose style and saying that his ‘supercharged "he-manishness" is brutal and infuriating’.