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“... of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the unrealised walk in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked at one road, then took ‘the other, as just as fair/And having perhaps the better ...”

“... of massified and conscripted culture and society. I think Wreszin is too uncritical of T.S. Eliot’s 1956 letter claiming that Macdonald’s ‘form of radicalism’ had most in common with Eliot’s ‘own form of conservatism’. Macdonald’s attacks, written for the New Yorker, on the vulgarisation of Webster’s ...”

“... Society’s petty rules do not apply to them, Sibella tells her lover before their coupling: ‘’tis our hearts alone that can bind the vow.’ Out of such interesting but inconclusive detail, Grundy tries to convince us that Secresy is a great book. Fenwick’s ‘artful’ handling of the epistolary form is reminiscent of Richardson, she suggests; the ...”

“... modest in all except their cultural ambitions, readers of, say, the New Statesman and George Eliot, who craved philosophy. Furthermore the media were willing to recognise their existence. In 1951 Stuart Hampshire produced a small book on Spinoza. Spinoza was, through his associations with 19th-century dissent, the philosopher designed to appeal to this ...”

“... drawn to right-wing totalitarianism and then became disillusioned with it – W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, for example – took refuge in an artistic flight from reality. Stuart’s work, after the war, became more real. He moved towards, not away from, the terrain of his shame. Other commentators, including Conor Cruise O’Brien, took the opposite view. I ...”

“... them? He thought it over, and made his offer. ‘Nothing.’ Hmm. Nothing? Well, what about T.S. Eliot’s death-socks, equally authenticated? ‘Nothing.’ So my own socks, were I to die in them tomorrow, would be worth less than nothing? ‘No, just nothing.’ Gekoski once sold Tolkien’s Oxford gown for about £500, but literary relics have to strike a ...”

“... nostalgia before closing time. Hence the primal dramatic function of allusion and quotation in Eliot and Joyce; hence Pound’s borrowed personae and Lowell’s ‘imitations’. In this dynamic custodianship, every vein of translation, from the most literal, as in Louis Zukofsky’s experiments in sound-for-sound transfer, all the way to the ...”

“... not from Mailer’s compulsions but with its own impulsion. Mrs Trilling turned upon Mailer T.S. Eliot’s praise of Henry James as having a mind so fine that no idea could violate it: ‘Of Mailer we can say that his novelist’s mind is peculiarly violable by idea, even by ideology.’ But the greatness of The Executioner’s Song is, surprisingly, in ...”

“... the United States. Longfellow’s 1867 translation of the Commedia revived Dante in America; T.S. Eliot’s polemical espousing of Dante’s austere sense of the world (more congenial to him than Shakespeare’s) set the Commedia squarely in the modern poetic mind as a text to be studied. There are poetic possibilities in Dante – the high drama of religious ...”

“... Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such Anglocentric and Italocentric definitions, but only by ascribing even greater consistency and homogenising power to Dante. Written in ‘the perfection of a common language’, the Commedia expresses the mentality of a ...”

“... His loyalties were separate if indivisible, and decades later he corrected his publisher T.S. Eliot’s reference to him – not Welsh, but ‘a Londoner of Welsh and English descent’. He was encouraged to draw from early on – the urge to convey the look of things was as involuntary ‘as stroking a cat’ – and, at his own insistence, was sent at ...”

“... web of relations in which they all come to seem indifferently interchangeable. If the book wasn’t so nervous of cultural theory, one might even detect in this method a trace of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s notion of ‘constellations’, a brand of surrealist sociology which abandons hierarchies and abstractions and lets its general ideas emerge ...”

“... We see it most perfectly at work when James has set himself some well-nigh impossible critical task, like celebrating Flaubert’s immense achievement while wishing it was even greater, or divining the precise mixture of Emerson’s gifts and limitations: ‘He has not a grain of current contempt; one feels, at times, that he has not enough.’ ‘We have ...”

“... clear, and it issues in a local discrimination which a reader of Pamela and Joseph Andrews can test. But some of the other comparisons seem illuminating when you first meet them and arbitrary a bit later. Why Camus? Why Ionesco rather than any other writer? If an 18th-century writer resembles a 20th-century writer in some respect, is it because sentiments ...”

“... has long outstripped its regional resources and reached the Colorado River, far to its east. T.S. Eliot’s Mississippi was a ‘strong brown god’: the Colorado River is more like a ruddy writhing serpent. Or was, since the snake has now been chopped into segments by dams, notably by Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon, and Hoover Dam south of ...”