Towards the end of 1935, shortly after the re-election of Britain's National Government under the leadership of Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Time and Tide reminded readers that it was ‘part of our deliberate policy to allow “Notes on the Way” writers an entirely free pen, however much we may disagree with them’. Declaring that ‘under no other condition than that of the consciousness of perfect freedom’ could the kind of notes it wanted be written, Time and Tide went on to introduce its Notes writer this week, the nonconformist journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, with the editorial explanation that: ‘We, ourselves, disagree with quite ninetenths of what he has to say. […] Nevertheless, he seems to us the kind of person who should – occasionally – be heard. He is thinking hard’ (30 Nov 1935: 1735). Originally conceived of and written by one of Time and Tide's most provocative writers, St. John Ervine (see Chapter 5), since 1932 ‘Notes on the Way’ had hosted many writers of different political persuasions, and Time and Tide's restatement of ‘Our Policy’ in this piece is consistent with the periodical's commitment from its inception to fostering open dialogue and debate between ‘thinking’ men and women. Nearly three years later, at the height of the Munich Crisis, another of Time and Tide's ‘Notes on the Way’ writers, Edward Thompson, stated that: ‘These Notes are the greatest opportunity in current journalism. Nowhere else are you free of the censorship clamped down, with increasing firmness, on newspaper column and broadcast talk’ (24 Sep 1938: 1307). Thompson's praise for the ‘opportunity’ afforded by Time and Tide's columns for unfettered opinion and comment is a further testament to the reputation the periodical had by now established among men as well as women as a leading weekly review. However, the freedom exercised in the periodical's pages must be qualified by the fact that by 1938 the vast majority of Time and Tide's Notes writers were men. To be sure, the column continued to host such distinguished figures as Odette Keun, Rose Macaulay and Ellen Wilkinson, as well as the periodical's political and literary editors Lady Rhondda and Theodora Bosanquet. But the marked decline in women's contributions inevitably raises questions about the extent to which women enjoyed ‘perfect freedom’ in Time and Tide's columns as the periodical moved into the second half of its second decade.