[2] Many distinguished writers have contributed, including T. S. Eliot, Henry James and Virginia Woolf.

Philip Larkin's poem "Aubade", his final poetic work, was first published in the Christmas-week issue of the TLS in 1977.

While it has long been regarded as one of the world's pre-eminent critical publications,[3] its history is not without gaffes: it missed James Joyce entirely,[citation needed] and commented only negatively on Lucian Freud from 1945 until 1978, when a portrait of his appeared on the cover.

[5][6] The TLS has included essays, reviews and poems by D. M. Thomas,[7][8] John Ashbery, Italo Calvino, Patricia Highsmith, Milan Kundera, Philip Larkin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Joseph Brodsky, Gore Vidal, Orhan Pamuk, Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney, among others.

Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist and the 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature,[10] described the TLS as "the most serious, authoritative, witty, diverse and stimulating cultural publication in all the five languages I speak".