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“... been all vitally indispensable.’ Someone who cared for tradition, as his fellow American T.S. Eliot so passionately cared for it, would not have introduced that old-English phrase ‘Christmas-tide’ into such promiscuous cosmopolitan company: the effect is brilliant but socially ‘smart’, which indeed is the general note of his letters (some of his ...”

“... Over sixty years ago Ezra Pound slashed a pencil through a verbose typescript by his friend T.S. Eliot, with results that are famous. More recently, Wendy Cope gave The Waste Land fresh scrutiny and decided that the job could be done pretty well in the space of five limericks. The first of these goes: In April one seldom feels cheerful; Dry stones, sun and ...”

“... talent for making people supercilious. But the derision itself – from his earliest reviewers to Eliot’s influential essay of 1930, ‘Arnold and Pater’, and even sometimes to Donoghue – is telling. So much animus spells some complicity. And some doubt about how to make sense of Pater, when he kept himself to his sentences. Modern biographers, thwarted ...”

“... at being in their company when he goes on to cite a long list of famous admirers including T.S. Eliot, Auden, Dorothy Parker, Wittgenstein and Cardinal Hume. McCrum’s store of unexpected detail makes clear Wodehouse’s determination to be a writer. He was a faithful recorder of encounters with strangers and overheard conversations. From 1901: ‘Bus ...”

“... in a dingy flat in Bayswater, where over the years Yeats and Graham Greene, W.H. Davies, T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley were among those who came for tea and buns under a single, unshaded electric light bulb. It also added lustre to some of her put-downs. Dealing with a Boston psychiatrist who demanded to know why she wrote about Christ rather than ...”

“... that beset them.’ In 1944 she submitted a manuscript to Faber, only to have it rejected by T.S. Eliot personally. Despite this, the impulse to create did not, as she half feared, leave her. In 1945 she was still wrestling with what she realised were her besetting demons as a writer. ‘Oh heaven this effort not to say things – to suppress the ...”

“... the first translations of Cavafy’s work into English and made it known to such figures as T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Here is Forster’s description of Cavafy: a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. His arms are extended, possibly . . . Yes, it is Mr Cavafy, and he is going either from his ...”

“... for this is that Gascoigne did not produce the blinding line or the sumptuous phrase for T.S. Eliot to home in on. No ‘bracelets of bright hair about the bone’ here. Indeed, his one poem in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse contains the exquisitely execrable lines ‘And popt a question for the nonce,/To beate my braynes about’. He ...”

“... memorable epigrams. I had seen shadows of his invention in Borges, snatches of his thought in T.S. Eliot, echoes of his paradoxes in Larkin, and an allusion to his imagery in Nabokov (I’m thinking of the ‘democracy of ghosts’ in Pnin, which recalls Chesterton’s definition of tradition as ‘the democracy of the dead’). I thought, and still ...”

“... his reviled mother rejoices, while the hated Dr Block tactlessly observes: ‘Undulant fever ain’t so bad, Azzberry . . . It’s the same as Bang’s in a cow.’ ‘He must have drunk some unpasteurised milk up there,’ he hears his mother sigh as they leave the room. In fact the disease-bearing milk was consumed not in New York, but while undertaking ...”

“... of his fiction, there are no railways, despite the many appearances of trains in his work: in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ‘modern life’ is described as stretching out its ‘steam feeler to this point three or four times a day’ and quickly withdrawing, as if what it found there was ‘uncongenial’. Wessex was where Hardy could stage his feeling ...”

“... to ever write anything lasting.’ ‘Cocteau was very brilliant the last time we met,’ T.S. Eliot told Stravinsky, ‘but he seemed to be rehearsing for a more important occasion.’ It’s a remark that returns us to Cocteau’s fascination with a perpetual adolescence – the ongoing crisis of all the possible persons you might be. But it turns out ...”

“... illustrious journal Critique, which he took as a rite of passage: ‘I knew, after passing this test, that I could, if I wanted to, become an art historian.’ Bois later returned the favour when he asked Derrida to turn his notes concerning Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh into an article that Bois published in Macula, the journal he launched with Jean Clay in ...”

“... further garbled as they spread across the world. Lang began to sense that Müller was, like George Eliot’s Casaubon, trapped in a futile search for a key to all mythologies. But he couldn’t say so openly, and so decided to leave Oxford, giving as the reason his impending marriage.He moved to Kensington, where he became a journalist and began his lifelong ...”

“... it was opened, many bodies were found still to be well housed. Most of the coffins had stood the test of time; they were stoutly made: an inner wood coffin was enclosed in a lead-lined outer one and the whole wrapped in studded leather. The contents of those which had mouldered and were in danger of spilling were examined by archaeologists from Oxford. All ...”