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“... At the end of June 1915, T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, both 27 years old, were married in a London register office. They had been introduced less than three months earlier by mutual friends in Oxford, where Eliot had been spending the year reading in the Bodleian and working on his Harvard doctoral dissertation in philosophy ...”

“... assassination in Victorian fiction: he had a gift for loathing his characters as great as George Eliot’s for finding the good in hers. And these different Merediths can appear disconcertingly cheek by jowl: it is as though Wordsworth were to take a break from the sublimities of ‘Tintern Abbey’ to write a few sardonic pages in the manner of Vanity ...”

“... was surely the Dantesque aspects of ‘Strange Meeting’ that drew a belated compliment from T.S. Eliot, who in 1964 described it as ‘not only one of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by the war of 1914-18, but also a technical achievement of great originality’.As​ in early Eliot, an entire tradition of ...”

“... for the first time are the absurdist letters they wrote together from Columbia Institute to T.S. Eliot and Malcolm de Chazal. The fall-out from Howl was immense, and not entirely benign. For a start, the San Francisco renaissance that had been quietly brewing for several years under the watchful guidance of Rexroth and Duncan suddenly became a New Yorker’s ...”

“... the very start of the play Marcellus remarks of what he and Barnardo have seen: ‘Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy.’ Three explanations of the Ghost are current in Hamlet. There is the suggestion that beholders are imagining it. People are often thought to imagine things in the play, and Hamlet and the Ghost both say that the weak imagine things. But ...”

“... to do just what he thought novelists shouldn’t, ‘point a moral and adorn a tale’.T.S. Eliot considered Lawrence a genius but counted among his failings ‘an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking’. The remark infuriated F.R. Leavis, but Lawrence himself would not have been especially wounded: what a Harvard man would ‘ordinarily call ...”

“... remember for the rest of your life, would you not prefer to dine with, say, Carlyle, or George Eliot, or Dickens, or Ruskin, or Tennyson, or even Gladstone? There might be torrential monologues, harsh tirades, uncomfortable silences, but at least you would have experienced a force of nature, you would have trod the slopes of the volcano. Bagehot, by ...”

“... we’re going to the dogs. But the staged apocalypse feels serendipitous, chancy, thrilling.Hardy, Eliot and Yeats loomed large in Auden’s pantheon, but he wasn’t about to be co-opted into anyone else’s story of tradition and the individual talent. He had a penchant for anagrams, and was pleased to know himself as someone who might ‘hug a wet shady ...”

“... intimacy with his readers in Wilson’s articles from these years. Halfway through a piece on T.S. Eliot’s For Lancelot Andrewes, for example, he can break in on his own prose and say, ‘I was writing last week on John Dos Passos,’ and then go on to make a comparison between the two authors’ respective forms of revulsion from industrial ...”

“... has never been very hospitable. ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,/Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain!’ Blake cries with all his effortless superiority. I find it slightly weird to see each year how warmly and spontaneously students endorse Blake’s attack on the spiritual blight of materialism and rationalism and experimental science, even as ...”

“... first undertook this large-scale biography of Yeats, died in 1983, and after some vicissitudes the task devolved on Roy Foster, the professor of Irish history at Oxford. He has had access to Lyons’s notes and transcripts, invaluable to a successor confronted, as he says, with ‘a vast and unfamiliar subject’. Vast it remains, but the unfamiliarity has ...”

“... ladylike black stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs’. Hawthorne, T.S. Eliot said, had ‘the firmness, the true coldness, the hard coldness of the genuine artist’. Eliot’s observation applies equally well to Hawthorne’s admirer, Eudora Welty, although others who have noted this similarity ...”

“... Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later it emerged that all that most pupils will face is a test based on extracts of verse and prose in a 45-page anthology which has just been published. Meanwhile Mr Patten, who has no powers to control university entrance, has urged vice-chancellors to stop admitting students whose spelling and grammar are not up to ...”

“... for the novel. The genre thrives on irony and play, as Milan Kundera repeatedly remarks, and T.S. Eliot meant to praise Henry James by suggesting he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. We might say the same of dozens of other novelists. Plenty of ideas, but none of them nailed down, all of them implicated in other, conflicting ideas; and there are ...”

“... be,’ Thomas Hardy wrote, ‘it exacts a full look at the worst,’ and there’s an echo of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in what happens to Phemy: the President of the Immortals has his sport with her. At times Coppard’s worst is even bleaker than Hardy’s. Hence the complaint of one reviewer when ‘The Hurly Burly’ appeared in Coppard’s second ...”