Oh damn, still in this dream.

Well, I don't normally open with a panegyric, and almost never one.....I suppose I'd better explain....

Having returned from a holiday with chums in the North of England I set about getting clothes washed, debating whether to tidy the flat properly now or defer the um, gratification of such pleasurable activity; during course of which I espied my as yet unread double Christmas edition of the Times Literary Supplement.

Some two hours later I returned to the world feeling better informed, refreshed, and recharged. Now that's probably because, as 

megiloth  says, I'm a poncy git liable to such behaviour. But I might still beg to differ, though I am indeed a poncy git. The TLS is, if you like, Murdoch's apology. It makes up for The Sun, The News of the World, and The New York Post. However, not even the TLS could begin to balance the scales of justice were The Fox Network on the other side. But I digress.

So I'll digress some more. I'd imagine that even the most rapacious media Baron (even if fiscally responsible like Murdoch, and unlike Black or Maxwell) has a side that still cultivates critical values. If you sell words by the billion every day, you must have some understanding of their power. In fact, even the fiscally irresponsible, like Black, crave academic and intellectual recognition: sometimes even writing pretty good biographies.

It is impossible to say how well the TLS has kept me informed over the years, and how indebted I have been to the debates taking place within its pages.
In the guise of book reviews it presents more information on more subjects in greater depth by great writers and critics than almost any other publication, though the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books both deserve honourable mentions, and the LRB has the most amusing adverts by far.

In my Anarcho-Syndicalist youth, I had a list of folk to be saved from the firing squads 'after the revolution'. These folk had all done something that redeemed them from the righteous justice of the proletariat. As we all now know, the revolution will never come, and the list will become even more yellowed with time: but as long as he keeps funding the TLS (because something like that loses money - it is not a profitable operation and must needs be a rich man's indulgence, like an expensive yacht) I suppose Ol' Roops name will be on the list.