BECAUSE OF THE bumper TLS centenary issue of January 18, the atmosphere in our Wapping fortress office has been mildly reminiscent of films featuring harassed editors of major broadsheets — a far cry from the usual sedate routine. Heightening the tension was a German film crew from a daily half-hour arts programme, Kulturzeit, which hung around one morning and took us by surprise as we proofread pages on screen. I couldn't help the little squeal of horror when I turned round to find the camera steadily aimed at my face. Various international papers have reported our birthday, a gratifying glut of attention, which goes a long way toward sustaining us during the days, sometimes nights, editing copy so that it (as John Sturrock, a former TLS deputy editor, put it) 'strikes academic readers as journalistic and journalistic readers as academic'. Our editor, Ferdinand Mount, in his essay on the paper in this issue, goes further by saying 'we do our best to disinfect reviews of the jargon, scrubbing wherever possible words such as "discourse", "alterity" and "aporia"' — a treatment not always appreciated by those most guilty. (I once heard a writer say that a good editor was one who didn't touch copy, a view which seems to me particularly specious.) Ferdy also appeared on BBC radio's Nightwaves, sounding, in his well-modulated voice, a reassuring note about our future and that of literary magazines in general. Which reminds me of the recent peremptory axing of The Australian's Review of Books, a controversial publication in its short life, but one which at least aspired to an independent overview amid a throng of partisan, sometimes parochial, literary journals. Long live ABR!

I recently went along to the National Portrait Gallery's photographic exhibition of noteworthy TLS contributors, past and present. Martin Amis stares out defiantly against a background of bright blue, alongside Julian Barnes looking sepulchral in a stark black and white; to their left, Penelope Fitzgerald appears quizzically intelligent. Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Henry James and a few other giants feature in those gorgeous, slightly blurry silver albumen prints. James, in profile, looks stern, exactly the kind of man who, on being asked to cut his essay on Balzac for the TLS in 1913, acquiesced, but replied: 'It bleeds. But it's a bloody trade' — an anecdote I found among many in Derwent May's Critical Times, his recently published history of the paper. May also devotes much space to T.S. Eliot's connection to the Lit Supp, as it was known, so it was a pleasure when his widow, Valerie, attended the launch of the book at the NPG. Her presence meant a lot to those for whom her husband was, and still is, the definitive modernist poet.

Fortunately, I got a ticket for the first TLS Centenary Lecture, also at the NPG. Ian McEwan, as Ferdy commented when introducing him, has had an irrepressible rise to literary stardom, a success evident in the full room and the solid queue of people waiting in vain for returns. The subject was, in a roundabout way, to do with death, less depressing than it sounds because of McEwan's elegant turn of phrase and flashes of humour. He focused on the critic Edmund Wilson, in particular a meeting Wilson once had with Edna St Vincent Millay, his lover of twenty years earlier. According to Wilson's journal, Millay had aged terribly and was addicted to morphine and alcohol. Could all the coquetry and brilliance of her youth, her promiscuity, her flamboyantly challenging poems, have been her way of staving off a date with death, McEwan implied. He also talked of Philip Larkin, whose heartbreaking poem 'Aubade', published in the TLS of 23 December 1977 (no concession to the festive season), squared up to 'The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always'. Finally, McEwan spoke of Ian Hamilton, éminence grise of the London literary scene and a highly valued TLS reviewer, who died at the end of 2001. For many of the audience, the lecture, which ended with one of Hamilton's short but never slight poems, was purposefully elegiac.

Heading out into the drizzle, unwilling to struggle with the dismal London Underground, I was fortunate enough to be able to splurge on a black cab home; for me, one of the capital's unique pleasures. Johnson's well-worn statement that 'when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford' has never been more perversely true. A cup of tea and a bacon roll may still be had for under £2 in the few remaining workers' caffs, but precious little else is affordable. At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I find it hard to maintain enthusiasm for the treasures of this city — the glorious building housing the Tate's Modern Art collection, for one — while the litter, crowds, traffic jams, vapidly corporate Starbucks and All Bar One pubs proliferate, and independent bookshops close down. Shopping malls rule.

At the Porchester Hall on January 17, the night of the TLS centenary party, around 500 people had gathered to drink to our health. Preceded by a terrific drum roll, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion read Yehuda Amichai's 1976 poem 'Like the Inner Walls of a House', one of the hundred published in A Century of Poems, compiled by the poetry editors of the paper, and a keepsake for our lucky guests. Paul Muldoon then beguiled us with 'To the Threshing-Floor', his ode to the paper to mark the occasion. Overall, it was a happy party and only two imbibers fell over. Long live the TLS!