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“... aside. Ruth Nevo, for example, in 1972 dismissed the question as ‘misconceived’. Jenkins isn’t so dismissive, but he does say one very odd thing, which I imagine others have pointed out: in the second footnote on page 137, he says that the word delay is ‘never used by or of Hamlet in the play’. This must be wrong, since Hamlet certainly does use ...”

“... essential isolation of man and the difficulty of communication’. What is the poet’s task? It is to put ‘into words those sudden desolations and happiness that descend on us uninvited there where we each are within our lonely rooms never really entered by anybody else and from which we never emerge.’ And this is not only the business of his ...”

“... those who found Partisan Review an alternative to callow nativism, a transatlantic lifeline to Eliot, Malraux, Silone. To give the roll-call of magazines, as Jumonville does, is to tell off from the New York Review of Books by way of Dissent, the New Republic, the New Leader, Commentary and the Nation, without exhausting the list. And almost all of the ...”

“... Longley and Muldoon. These writers were led to him by content but stayed for the style. Auden or Eliot’s influence can be overwhelming for a writer, their tone is so settled, their territory staked out so thoroughly. But a novice poet can wander around perfectly happily for years in MacNeice’s enormous and baggy Collected Poems and emerge with a decent ...”

“... of historical violence. A different speech is coming from the silence of the church. T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, naming the private places where insight takes place, calls one of them ‘the draughty church at smokefall’. At its highest and most serious moments, its most searching inquiries into the human, the Renaissance theatre in England ...”

“... might have gone on, if Pound hadn’t disappeared into funny money, the Cantos and obloquy, or Eliot into verse drama and High Anglicanism. Bunting’s Complete Poems are a tantalisingly small and pure uchronia, and as for his life, his model in these things was Walter Raleigh. A Life of Bunting, then, was for many years the most obviously ...”

“... glee, the other with open resentment, for all their reactions were obviously ambivalent. T.S. Eliot courteously but firmly refused her poems and articles for the Criterion, and he was a shrewd judge of the poetry of his contemporaries. It is true that Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse, which came out in 1936, gave her as much space as any ...”

“... Beer’? Why instead do we have this persona who has been reading, all too devotedly, T.S. Eliot? Donne, Andrewes, Taylor – all have, as it were, the Good Housekeeping (Eliotic) seal of approval; there are authorities, less illustrious but more modern as well as more ancient, whom to approve would risk more ridicule and carry that much more ...”

“... disappeared as a coherent work. The other inhabitant of Locust Street at this time was T.S. Eliot. Born in 1888 at no 2635 (presumably a long way from Crawford’s Theatre), he lived there until 1905, when he began his own journey to Parnassus via the appropriately named Milton Academy in Massachusetts, followed by Harvard and then Paris, Oxford and ...”

“... of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find themselves confronting a shrewd scholar who denies them the luxury of easy retort – he lashes out from ...”

“... Second Coming’ and ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’; and reviewed Ulysses, Marianne Moore (by T.S. Eliot), Charlie Chaplin, Gertrude Stein, Pirandello, Hemingway and Al Jolson. Just about the only body of avant-garde work that was missing was that of the Russians, from whom the Dial shied away because of the editors’ cautious politics. Through the ...”

“... comedy, as in literature, takes some unexpected twists and, like the tradition described by T.S. Eliot, ‘does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations’. Morecambe and Wise were themselves influenced by solo comedians: Morecambe was a great fan of Buster Keaton and Phil Silvers, and his incompetent ventriloquist act clearly ...”

“... of Urquhart’s frequent Classical quotations have been tracked down, which must have been no mean task, considering Urquhart’s habits of misquotation and misattribution. And most of the innumerable more or less obscure Scots soldiers and savants that Urquhart mentions have been located, so that this edition will be very useful for anyone dealing with ...”

“... Tory politicians like Lord Hugh Thomas, the distinguished historian of Spain and Cuba, see the task of historians as the creation of a usable past which will confirm the version of history peddled in the popular press, furnish yet another justification of their claim to authority and boost the sagging morale of an embittered populace. We therefore face ...”

“... Once upon a time the novelist’s task was to be realistic and to tell a story that was lifelike, convincing and ‘sincere’. Today’s novelists are counter-Aristotelians, spinners of tall tales and colourful yarns, engaged, as it seems, in some eternal childlike competition to impress their hearers and see who can get away with telling the biggest whopper ...”