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Welcome from Ferdinand Mount, Editor, The Times Literary Supplement The back numbers of the TLS have long been legendary as a store of treasure for anyone interested in twentieth-century literature. But until now they have remained partly buried treasure. Up to 1974, the reviews were almost always anonymous, their authors’ names lurking in the paper’s old records. This absence of accessible information was disabling. We could hear only one end of the century’s literary conversation. Who was it who took that view of Proust or Eliot or Freud, of Solzhenitsyn or Seamus Heaney? How much weight should be attached to this early recognition of talent or that denunciation? We could only guess. This unsatisfactory situation would have continued had it not been for the energy of my predecessor as editor, Jeremy Treglown. He it was who proposed a scheme for an electronic archive with a full index of contributors, enlisted the enthusiasm of the paper’s owners, persuaded the Leverhulme Trust that future generations would thank it for its support, and then, with the dynamic assistance of Deborah McVea, embarked on this huge enterprise in an amazingly brief space of time. As a result, in what seems like the blink of a PC we now have available across the world an archive which will not only provide the full text of the TLS over the years, but wherever possible reveal the identity of every contributor and include biographical information. The archive shows a TLS which is both strange and familiar: strange, because in its early years the paper was noticeably more Britain-based and less international than it later became. Today more than half our readers and a good fraction of our contributors live outside the UK. By contrast, a high proportion of the reviewers in the earliest decades had been educated in Oxford, Cambridge or London, and still lived in one of those cities. Yet their interests were rarely insular, nor were they stuck in the English mud. From the start the TLS was open to the foreign, the radical and the adventurous, never ashamed to be critical of conventional wisdom, addicted to rigorous standards in all branches of scholarship, quite often wrong, but never hitched to any party line and incurably hospitable to the eccentric and the unfashionable. We hope it still is.
Ferdinand Mount Editor, The Times Literary Supplement
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