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“... radical social experiments were nipped in the bud by the entrenched forces of reaction, while T.S. Eliot’s successors imagine devout cavaliers preserving a unified sensibility in economic and spiritual matters. Apart from the therapy it offers against the perpetual unsatisfactoriness of the present, this construction of the past has the great merit of making ...”

“... precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at an age when most of his ...”

“... lavishing it on the artists he admired, and on many he didn’t, including his former friend T.S. Eliot. Thayer found The Waste Land ‘disappointing’, yet he was its American publisher and gave Eliot the Dial Award, which was worth $2000, the same as his annual salary at the bank. Thayer’s manner could be remote and ...”

“... perfectly at home in the introduction to a student edition thirty years ago. It may be that the task he sets himself – that of taking proper cognisance of reception aesthetics, current bibliography and the more convincing variants of post-structuralism, while nonetheless producing cheerfully definitive thematic readings – is simply impossible. When it ...”

“... grasp the principle of the Jamesian “central intelligence”, as well as the principle that T.S. Eliot would later popularise as the “objective correlative”’. It is quite true that London clearly had the greatest respect for not only literary craft but for the kind of critical principles that were taught at the universities he sporadically attended and ...”

“... with nothing to conceal; a man of intensely “private life”, but wholly transparent’ – T.S. Eliot on Spinoza and, incidentally, on himself. Beckett, I suppose, was such another. He was, though, a writer of the greatest reticence but with everything to reveal. Heartfelt. To the last. Not to the last trump (in which he blessedly did not believe), but to ...”

“... charge against the Los Alamos scientists. Any group of people working intensely on a difficult task against time will find it hard to suppress feelings of comradeship and of pride in their progress, as long, of course, as they do not believe the objective to be fundamentally evil. These feelings are not inconsistent with an awareness of the seriousness of ...”

“... hatband. James goes as far as it is possible to go towards miscegenating Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and The John Curry Spectacular. Even he cannot blink the dullness of television, however. He seeks to pay compliments to soap operas and spectaculars, and curls his lip at avant-gardism, and programmes which ‘Explore the Medium’. But a defensive note ...”

“... Shelley’s radical political beliefs is surely very important. (It was on such grounds that T.S. Eliot rejected him.) Can they really be treated – say, like Milton’s religious ones – as a mere poetical frame? In the long, central discussion of Shelley’s anarchism, Dr Dawson suddenly writes: ‘In the perspective of philosophical anarchism it is moral ...”

“... fear is more intimate and eats into the family and the imagination. One may question with T.S. Eliot whether a civil war ever does end. It may pervade the metabolism of subsequent generations and appear in new psychological and historical traumas, being fed by the memories and passions it feeds, each major crisis leading to other crises. The Greek Civil ...”

“... things in this book, it is printed in a footnote. The book is a version of Mitchell’s 1979 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, and, especially when deprived of the original film and musical illustrations, the form seems unsatisfactory – chatty, untidy and partial. Mitchell’s scholarship is indispensable to students of Britten, as it is to those of Mahler, but ...”

“... Characters are continually pelting each other with chunks of Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot. There are even a couple of discreet allusions to Areté, the author’s own literary journal, though with commendable delicacy Raine refrains from providing the address of the subscriptions manager. The reader stumbles unexpectedly on a brief essay on ...”

“... flavour. Whether apocalyptic or Byronic, the fierce expression of sincerity has dated. But T.S. Eliot believed in Barker’s poetry and fixed him up with jobs in Japan when he wanted to escape from one or both of his ladies. His troubles were real enough, and so was his father, a grim butler and ex-Guardsman known as ‘the colonel’, of whom Barker in his ...”

“... said he felt that as one held to be German he hadn’t ‘any right to be in this country’. T.S. Eliot, who taught him for a while at school, would sign himself ‘Metoikos’, and it seems that in this, though in few other respects, Eliot and Betjeman shared a feeling. As a matter of fact, the Betjemann family seems to ...”

“... novel, comes when Jamie reflects from Byron: Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence. ‘He picked up the coffee-pot. By Byron’s standards, he was not a man.’ But is he even an existence? Twenty pages later, and now in that foreign country from which he had emigrated, Canada, his rage splutters into the murder ...”