"The ravings of a drunken helot" was the TLS’s verdict on T.S. Eliot’s poetry, in the early years of last century. So far from taking it personally, Eliot responded by writing some of his most famous critical essays for the paper, in the 1920s, when TLS readers were also treated to the stylish reviews written by another of the legendary Editor, Bruce Richmond’s discoveries: a "clever young woman" called Virginia Woolf.

Times have changed and so has the TLS, but not the quality of its writers. They come from the world-wide republic of letters, and in the past thirty years alone, high points have included essays, review and poems by Italo Calvino, Mavis Gallant, Patricia Highsmith, Milan Kundera, Philip Larkin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Joseph Brodsky, Gore Vidal, Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.

Internationally renowned scholars such as Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Claude Rawson rub shoulders in our pages with front-rank novelists such as A.S. Byatt, Ali Smith and Joyce Carol Oates; the acclaimed biographers, Hermione Lee, Graham Robb, Jonathan Bate and Roy Foster with heavy-hitting philosophers Thomas Nagel, Daniel Dennett and Martha Nussbaum. Groundbreaking scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Tim Flannery make the extraordinary accessible alongside the discoveries of the explorers Redmond O’Hanlon and Robin Hanbury-Tenison.

Stefan Collini, Edmund White, Elaine Showalter, Clive James – whom more than one reader has dubbed ‘the Montaigne of our day’ – A.N. Wilson and the indefatigable Christopher Hitchens bring authority and wit and a welcome touch of waspishness to everything they write, not least in the TLS, where they make regular appearances.

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