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| IN THIS WEEK'S TLS SUMMER DOUBLE ISSUE |
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This is what we might call an "interactive" week at the TLS – and not just because the reaction of letter writers to Richard Dawkins on Christopher Hitchens in the last issue has been so angry and intense, almost reaching that of our review of Dawkins's own book by the Nobel Laureate, Steven Weinberg, in January.
Perhaps similar levels of response were reached in great TLS rows of the past. We do not have the records to tell us. But thanks to the infinite capacity of websites we can certainly now publish far more of this "interactivity" than we ever could before. Religious argument, it seems, attracts comment like nothing else bar the subject of the Web itself.
Not everyone is happy about this explosion of talk. This week our regular writer on new technologies, Paul Duguid, examines a claim that far from extending international debate on big issues the impact of "shrill opinions" and "superficial observations" on the internet is "killing our culture". The author of the book under review, however, is himself "not free from these failings".
Richard Davenport-Hines looks back to the glorious pre-Web days of the 1910–11 Encyclopaedia Britannica, the subject of some of the most extended reviews in the early years of the TLS. Like many of us he finds this edition still invaluable, not because it is up to date or easy to navigate, but because "its content is so clear-headed and discriminating" – books "written by an elite" with "elite values on every page".
An especially skilled Victorian expert on managing "conflict among her correspondents" was, we learn, the best-selling writer, feminist, sociologist and anti-slavery campaigner, Harriet Martineau. As Maria Frawley notes, this formidable controversialist had a particular dislike of that leading attractor of letters, The Times, a "rotten old oracle" as she termed it; sadly, she died too early to be able to take a view of the – even then, highly interactive – Times Literary Supplement.
Peter Stothard
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