As an editor, Bruce Richmond was apolitical and broadly tended towards whatever line was followed by his close friend the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson. The sub-editors on the TLS in the inter-war years included the bibliophile and historian of publishing F. A. Mumby and Eric St John Brooks, a mathematician by training, who had wide-ranging interests but no particular bent for politics. D. L. Murray, the assistant editor, gave the appearance of never taking anything very seriously: his main enthusiasms were the theatre, horse racing and middlebrow fiction (he soon became a commercially successful novelist). But he was a clever man who, after winning scholarships to Harrow and Balliol and taking a First in Classics, had published a book on pragmatism while he was in his early 20s and spent the First World War in the Intelligence Department of the War Office. He later wrote a study of Disraeli. In 1938, Murray reluctantly succeeded Richmond as editor and it must have been partly under his influence that the TLS steered its way through the political minefields of the 1920s and 30s.

On Communism, the ‘TLS’ Centenary Archive fills out the picture sketched in Ferdinand Mount’s Communism: A ‘TLS’ Companion (1992), a useful selection of the journal’s more polemical responses to the movement between 1902 and 1991. In the 1920s, the reviews were as often supercilious as morally hostile. A front-page piece on ‘The Aims of Socialism’, for example, was written in the autumn of 1927 by Arthur D. Shadwell, a leader writer for The Times who had travelled widely, including in Russia, and had contributed regularly to the TLS since it began. Although Shadwell had published books on social questions such as water supply, industrial efficiency and legislation on alcohol consumption, and although – or because? - the works under review included some by authors of the distinction of Harold J. Laski and A. D. Lindsay, his approach was nit-pickingly unsympathetic to the human concerns which lay behind their subject. He was more interested in picking up inconsistencies both in Marx (if socialism is an inevitable evolutionary process, he asked, why try to persuade anyone to help it along?) and in the books under review (which he said failed to distinguish between economic equality and economic justice) than in trying to get at what might have prompted such ideas, however misguided they were. There were many other pieces on related subjects and by a number of different reviewers. Some were straightforwardly descriptive, such as H. M. Stannard’s 1928 account of an interim collection of Stalin’s statements on Leninism. Others, especially those dealing with the more sentimental works of the 1930s literary left, were justifiably exasperated: Geoffrey West on John Middleton Murry’s The Necessity of Communism (1932), for example, which incidentally demonstrated once again the TLS’s willingness to deal frankly with its own contributors; or Herbert Charles O’Neill on Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism (1937: ‘Mr Spender would probably flinch at paradox, but he does not disdain incoherence’); or Stannard, again – one of the TLS’s most frequent contributors on politics and, like West, someone who first began writing there in the 1920s – on C. L. R. James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936: ‘Here is truth. It must be true because the writer believes it. Yet the facts contradict it.’

The most complex of the paper’s reviewers in this area was also to be its most controversial. E. H. Carr, who later joined the staff of The Times, was a Cambridge-educated diplomat who had spent his mid-thirties in the British Legation in Riga and had written a book on Dostoevsky. To him, Marxism was ‘amazingly penetrating, incisive and convincing’ as a critique of nineteenth-century capitalism. Opinions of this sort have been seized on by his conservative critics, especially since his death, so it is instructive to look back at some of the pieces which he wrote anonymously in the 1930s and to see how his views changed and to what extent then, if not later, he opposed Stalinism. The words about Marxism just quoted, which appeared in the TLS in 1936, were followed by another sentence: ‘Constructively, it has nothing to offer but a workers’ paradise no more substantial than the rose-coloured dreams of the French Utopian Socialists.’ Earlier that year, reviewing John L. Spivak’s Europe under the Terror, Carr said that the ‘Red Terror’ was quite as obnoxious as the ‘Black’, on which the book concentrated. And in 1937 he was still clearer and more specific on this point in a review of three books on the current situation in the Soviet Union, pointing out the number of people mentioned in them who had subsequently been shot or arrested, and concluding that nearly all of the arguments put by one of the authors in favour of ‘Soviet democracy’ ‘could equally well be used to substantiate Herr Hitler’s claim to have established "true democracy" in Germany.’

What should be done about Hitler was a different question. Carr was one of the TLS’s contributors who upheld the pro-appeasement line of The Times, not least as late as June 1939 in a supportive review of Neville Chamberlain’s The Struggle for Peace. Like many well-informed and well-intentioned people between the late 1920s and 1939, contributors to the TLS havered over Nazism and still more over Italian Fascism. Sixty-five works on Fascism had been reviewed by 1939. Some reviewers, such as the Catholic historian R. E. Gordon George (‘Robert Sencourt’), were at pains to point out the hazards of any threat to democracy and individualism, whatever its political colouring. But others, especially Stannard, were increasingly won over by the social improvements which Fascism brought to Italy. In June, 1934, a twenty-eight page special issue on Italy began with two long pieces on Fascism, in one of which Stannard not only applauded Mussolini’s social achievements but found a resemblance between his prose style and the poetry of Hardy. British Fascism, meanwhile, was treated with more caution, though it was accepted by H. C. O’Neill in a short notice of A. K. Chesterton’s Oswald Mosley: Portrait of a Leader (1930) that Mosley’s career contained ‘a thread of not ignoble purpose’.

Most reviewers saw that totalitarianism in Europe had been born out of the First World War and there was an especially strong wish to see Italy – a wartime ally of the British – succeed, as well as to see Communism fail. In the case of Germany, there was also an awareness of the mistakes that the victors had made in the post-war Versailles settlement. The Italian special number had been preceded by one on Germany, published in April 1929, which focussed on what could still then be seen as hopeful elements in the country’s development, including the in retrospect chilling revival of the Jugendbewegung: ‘a living faith which rejects all credence in the world-picture of modern science.’ (The article - by Rolf Gardiner, something of an enthusiast for Nazi Germany in its early days - related the movement’s spirit to that of D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent and pointed out that the achievement of world peace was entirely unimportant to its adherents.) It was a very long time before Hitler and Nazism were taken as serious dangers. Reviewing Wyndham Lewis’s Hitler (1931), Stannard mildly took issue with Lewis’s view that despite the intrinsic antisemitism of the movement, ‘Hitler himself, if he attained to power, would treat Einstein with proper honour.’ Stannard also judged that although Nazism ‘is for the moment in eclipse, more is likely to be heard of it.’ But in 1933 another regular political contributor, J. H. Freeman, writing about The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and Hamilton Fish Armstrong’s Hitler’s Reich: The First Phase, opined that it was ‘unduly alarmist’ of the latter to suggest that a European war was not excluded from the Nazi programme. The following year, Leland Stowe’s book Nazi Germany Means War was again dismissed as exaggerated, though a study of Nazism by Henry Wickham Steed, himself a frequent TLS contributor (and a former editor of The Times) was treated more respectfully. The book called for a readiness in Britain ‘to sacrifice the sovereign right of neutrality in order to redeem law-abiding mankind from … lawless violence.’ This was towards the end of 1934 and the reviewer – Freeman, again – was evidently coming to accept Steed’s view that ‘those who believe in responsible freedom and democratic government must marshal their strength now.’

Among the pieces of evidence which were beginning to increase readers’ pessimism about Hitler in the early to mid 1930s were some powerful accounts by people who had been in Nazi prisons. In 1935, Gollancz published I Was Hitler’s Prisoner by Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian journalist who had been held without charge for more than six months. Among his fellow-prisoners was the Jewish former curator of pictures in the Munich Pinakothek, who was beaten up by his captors so badly and so often ‘that he answered all questions in the affirmative. If he had been accused of the murder of the Emperor Maximilian he would have pleaded guilty to this crime as well. The inspectors perceived what a torment their questioning was to Professor Mayer. So they had him brought up every day. "Let’s take it out of the Jew a bit.…"’ Lorant also related that when he was released and returned home to Budapest, his three-year-old son greeted him with the Nazi salute and a cry of ‘Heil, Hitler.’ These bitternesses were relayed in the TLS’s review, the author of which, once again, was Freeman. By April 1936, Freeman was writing of Nazism as ‘the resuscitation of medieval barbarism’ in a review of another Gollancz book, The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany, paired with Norman Bentwich’s The Refugees from Germany: April, 1933 to December, 1935. The piece was headed plainly, ‘The Nazi Persecution.’