In March 1928, just seven weeks after Time and Tide published its first contribution from Virginia Woolf and while readers continued to debate ‘The Future of the Press’ in the periodical's correspondence pages (see Chapter 4), the author of Time and Tide's regular ‘In the Tideway’ feature reflected ironically on the changes currently taking place in the paper: ‘Of course what is really wrong with TIME AND TIDE is that it is too Highbrow. I mean what we all really want is more Social News’ (23 Mar 1928: 294). Proceeding to list numerous examples of ‘Social News’ presented by the newspapers this week (from the departure for the Near East of a Mrs Routledge due to an attempted burglary on her Hyde Park home, to the names of the guests at a recent At Home to discuss the organisation of a charity matinee in aid of a ‘Lost Cats’ Home’) ‘North Wind’ concludes teasingly: ‘We are terribly remiss. I mean, these are really important things, aren't they?’ As discussed in the previous two chapters Time and Tide was working energetically in this period to move out of the ‘women's paper’ category and in this piece Time and Tide's columnist both identifies and dismisses the risk the periodical ran of appearing ‘too Highbrow’ in the eyes of its target audience as it moved towards the intellectual sphere. The readers Time and Tide addresses here will, it is assumed, recognise the unimportance of such items of ‘Social News’ compared with the periodical's own coverage of important developments in politics, literature and the arts, and thus share a common interest in accessing the perceived higher culture. At the same time the humour negotiates an element of uncertainty about the periodical's reception in the context of an evolving discourse about brows. By 1928, as Melissa Sullivan points out, ‘the initial wave of the “battle of the brows” [had] commenced in full force’ with the publication of Leonard Woolf's Hunting the Highbrow (1927) and J. B. Priestley's ‘High, Low, Broad’ (1927), and Time and Tide's editors and contributors were inevitably ‘plunged into’ this battle (2011: 97–100). With particular reference to the ways in which these culture wars were manifest in the world of books, this chapter explores how Time and Tide navigated increasing tensions between ‘high’ and ‘middlebrow’ spheres, and succeeded in straddling both.