IT IS ONE OF LIFE’S more solitary and secretive pleasures, a Friday ritual that transports the lucky few out of the hurly-burly of their daily routine and into a private place of thick, rustling pages turning and moments of pure joy.

I refer, of course, to reading The Times Literary Supplement, that coded message to the intellectual elite whose 36 pages of densely packed articles have come out regularly for the past century and a bit, and whose first 100 years of existence have been given an appreciative once-over this month on Radio 4.

TLS Tales proved a bit of a tour de force. In five episodes on Radio 4, it took listeners into the beating heart of a weekly whose circulation has never topped 50,000 and is now level-pegging at about 35,000 worldwide, and somehow managed to convey all its discreet charm.

Everything about The TLS has always been endearingly odd. The myth that it put out about itself is that it was started, back in 1902, as a dumping-ground for all the reviews squeezed out of the daily Times by its coverage of the Boer War. That wasn’t true, as it turns out. It was just that the editor of the day wasn’t really sure whether having a separate book-review section would work, and chose to hide shyly behind this artful excuse for his paper’s existence.

A later Editor, Lord Northcliffe, was always trying to shut The TLS down; too full of clever old Wyckhamists (“the monks of Printing House Square”) who resisted control; too subversive by half. But the orders he telegraphed from yachts and mansions around Europe to can the supplement were always quietly ignored. Later he went mad. The TLS survived.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that The TLS abandoned its old habits of anonymity. Long after Fleet Street had gone over to articles by named writers, it had carried on publishing without authors’ signatures.

That had the advantage of stopping cults of personality developing; but it had also allowed ferocious vendettas between academics to rage on through those dry, crackling pages. Only as the centenary celebrations got going did the archives finally open to reveal the names of some of the most poisonous reviewers.

Being supremely highbrow (except perhaps for a brief flirtation with populism during the Second World War, when it went so far as to run a weekly crossword puzzle) made The TLS a magnet for young writers and poets who didn’t mind that reviewing for it hardly paid enough to keep them in tea and cigarettes.

We heard the impressions of a young editorial assistant (Martin Amis) who eagerly gave up a copywriting job for something that had more of an aura: “I felt I was continuing to improve my mind at The TLS.”

Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis were among an earlier generation of reviewers; before them, there was T. S. Eliot. The programme carried excerpts from the imaginative travel and cookery book reviews of another reviewer from the Twenties: Virginia Woolf.

As well as the glories, the series also recalled a few less than inspired reviews, including the one that rubbished The Hound of the Baskervilles: “As for the hound, so long as he was only heard not seen he was very effective and thrilling,” it sniffed. “But once the hound comes on stage he ceases to excite our curiosity . . . If his victim threw a stone at him, he would run away, like other big dogs.”

One of the great joys of good radio is the speed and ease with which it can carry listeners off into the most esoteric of other worlds. Helen Boaden, the Radio 4 controller, says she picks her programmes knowing that Radio 4 listeners are all immensely inquisitive and eager to find out about life’s hidden corners. Yet to be able to transform the history of a weekly paper that is a passion for just 35,000 readers into a story that delights millions of radio listeners must, even on Radio 4, count as an unusual success.