Vida and the pie charts

The Vida survey of reviewers and and books reviewed by men and women is still attracting attention.

There is a particularly good and fair contribution by Ruth Franklin in the New Republic.

Daniel E. Pritchard, commenting in Frank Wilson's excellent Books, Inq, is right that there are many kinds of book reviews - and many ways to judge them -  'Reader response? Historical analysis? Craft and form? Idiosyncratic style, or journalistic lack of style? Short-form or long form? Academic deep insight or breezy general reader?'

But that in no way invalidates the duty of editors to make judgements. Wilson himself is one of those judges, a fine one, and it is important that his arts of judgement, and the arts of those equally committed and determined, survive in our turbulent times.

At the TLS we take the most seriously the requirement that the TLS selects, without prejudice, fear or favour, the writers who have the best things to say about the books we think are important.

We use the word 'best' within a long and evolving tradition that defines what the TLS is.

To give any requirement  a higher priority than excellence - or to commision reviews for any other reasons than that - would risk the intellectual reputation that is more vital to us than any other and alone makes our choice of books and reviewers worth discussion at all.

Quotas are not a new question. Sometimes readers of the TLS tell me we are favouring Oxford over Cambridge, Texas over Scotland, French over Spanish and yes, men over women. Publishers occasionally complain that they are systematically neglected. So do national champions and those who put the highest value on gender equality. We always note what is said.

No one here, however, has specific instructions in that regard. Nor should they. Equality in any category would be hard to achieve, in every category impossible. I like to see reasonable balances - and would be concerned if it could be shown that Russia had double the representation of Germany, that Harvard produced twice the number of reviewers or books reviewed as did Yale.

 So, yes, Vida's pie charts are good food for thought - and a range of explanations, some of them well beyond the responsibility of editors, have already been given for them.

The TLS is absolutely open to new critics and writers, young critics and writers, and to those who have new books to promote. That goes some way to explaining why, by Vida's standards, we do better than our closest competitors. I would expect that at the TLS more reviewers review more books by more writers from more places than at any other paper - although I am not about to take time out from editing to produce a pie chart that proves that.