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“... Lives is to come across the name of one person after another who did this: Tallulah Bankhead, T.S. Eliot, Sheilah Graham, Ernest Hemingway. To be sure, Mellow is undoubtedly correct in asserting that the Fitzgeralds had it worse than most. But this is hardly news. Their version is by now a cliché of American literary history. We all know that, for Scott and ...”

“... elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his abortive mission to India. Working for the BBC gave Orwell the experience, however unwelcome, of functioning as an individual ...”

“... of its own world, and of course the people inside it. A single topic occupies our minds. ’Tis hinted at or boldly blazoned in Our accents, clothes and ways of eating fish, and being introduced and taking leave, ‘Farewell’, ‘So long’, ‘Bunghosky’, ‘Cheeribye’ – That topic all-absorbing, as it was, Is now and ever shall be, to us ...”

“... first, and probably best-known book, Opera as Drama, which combines the dramatic criticism of T.S. Eliot, Una EllisFermor and Francis Fergusson with a highly selective view of operatic history. As with Taruskin and Josephson, the merging of the historical with the systematic sharpens the perception and makes sense of the material, with the difference that the ...”

“... One can only agree with that ‘poet, playwright, critic, editor and publisher’, T.S. Eliot (whose later life, Richard Ellmann informs us, ‘became rather stately’): ‘I did not know death had undone so many.’ When originally conceived, Lee observed that ‘national biography must be prepared to satisfy the commemorative instinct of all ...”

“... was soon to write ‘The Fly’. Around the corner, as it were, downstream at Lausanne, was T.S. Eliot, granted sick leave by his bank to recover from a breakdown caused by his marriage. He had brought with him a long poem... A mile or so upstream from Sierre, at Muzot, was Rainer Maria Rilke, whose Duino Elegies, held in suspension throughout the war, would ...”

“... recommended in the respective governments’ instructions to their dual citizens. How right T.S. Eliot was, if on a more mundane level than he intended, to advise travellers that ‘You are not the same people who left that station/Or who will arrive at any terminus.’Passports as a prerequisite for travelling to foreign countries came in with the First ...”

“... they argue, ‘allows the variety of meanings he actually intends.’ The close reader’s task is to recognise the simultaneous presence of conflicting possibilities, and find a meaning embracing ‘as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning’. The young William Empson, who had been reading Graves for some while, adapted this ...”

“... Shaw argues, ‘now you have exposition, situation and discussion; and the discussion is the test of the playwright.’ This argument seems a little dubious when applied to Ibsen (if the final argument between Nora and Torvald in A Doll’s House is a ‘discussion’, the term applies to every non-violent climactic scene in dramatic literature). But ...”

“... civilisation of Europe. The critics who saw the poem in this solemn light, particularly T.S. Eliot and E.R. Curtius, had obvious reasons for wanting to believe in a southern European classic which was supranational and religious. To these conservatively inclined modernists Dante’s theological and political vision was the ultimate antidote to ...”

“... I speak passionately,/that’s when I’m least to be trusted.’ Alluding to T.S. Eliot, Glück has written that ‘you cannot be so alert to a species of agony without having felt it,’ and admits that she understands our desire to read poems autobiographically. But she isn’t trying to express the truth of a particular feeling self: she is ...”

“... world that informed its making. Usually, we rely on the notion of ‘style’ to help with this task, to connect the work to the individual manner of its creator as well as to the collective Kunstwollen (or ‘artistic will’) of its culture. As the index of the artist and the period, ‘style’ is crucial to the chronological basis of the ...”

“... out to wrest the literature of the period from what they saw as the political conservatism of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. For them, the illocutionary force of talking about ‘literature and politics’ was to say ‘I am a young radical who wants to show the value to the left of writing from this period.’ David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic is ...”

“... In his essay on Lancelot Andrewes, T.S. Eliot wrote about ‘relevant intensity’. Contemporary British and American writers are in love with what might be called irrelevant intensity. In fiction, information has become the new character, and information is endless. We know the signs of irrelevant intensity: an obsession with pop-culture trivia; a love of the comedy of culture rather than the comedy of character; zany scenes interrupted by essayistic riffs – on hotel minibars, on videophones, on the semiotics of street manners in major European cities, what have you – the riffs always expertly blending the sentimental and the Cultural-Studies-theoretical; a tendency to elongate into lists whenever possible (of the ‘there were ten things that Brian really disliked’ kind); kooky epigraphs, mixing high and low authorities; long, feverish run-on sentences, desperately semaphoring their gross mimetic appetite, their need to capture as much of ‘the madness of the times’ as possible, as much of ‘the way we live now’; and a frequent oiling of italics ...”

“... was the third version of ‘On Being Ill’ to appear in print – the first was published by T.S. Eliot in the New Criterion of 1926; the essay also surfaced again in two collections edited by Leonard Woolf after Virginia’s death. As Lee’s introduction makes clear, these various incarnations are far from identical, but the history she outlines sorts ...”