“... combines their traditions, right down to following James in this book to where T.S. Eliot was mildly shocked to find him, seeking spiritual life in English country houses. Conrad’s pertinence to Naipaul is written not all over, but all in, the novels of the Seventies, and ‘Conrad’s Darkness’ was enlightened by Naipaul in an essay of ...”

“... is a difference between what Middlemarch is seeking to do at any particular point, and what George Eliot had in mind at the time, if she had anything particular in mind at all. The literary intentions that matter are those built into a work itself, rather as the structure of a chair ‘intends’ one’s sitting on it. If I say, ‘I promise to loan you five ...”

“... and Morgan’s novel subtly and not ignobly acknowledges this and embodies it. Morgan and T.S. Eliot were fellow Kensingtonians and clearly had a great deal in common. The spirituality of Four Quartets, combining grave withdrawn delicacy with a remarkable power of commanding instant middlebrow popularity, has much in common with that of The Fountain, even ...”

“... yet to sidle up to it from the outside, was the peculiar privilege of Wilde, Yeats, Conrad, James, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Beckett, nomadic souls adrift between home and abroad. Wilde, Conrad, James and Eliot betray their foreign status by becoming plus anglais que les Anglais, too deeply, self-consciously inside to count as ...”

“... concerned. Criticism (pace Hirsch) rates significance above meaning because the critic’s prime task is not to agree but to disagree with the prevailing views. But disagreement – and intellectual life in general – becomes pointless unless there is some common ground of agreement to start from. The critic’s role (and here I agree with Docherty) is an ...”

“... Instead he dedicated himself to learning English, which led to work as a translator (of T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner, as well as crime fiction), to foreign travel (he was in the US when government troops fired on students in Tiananmen Square) and a doctorate. But familiarity – Qiu has lived in the US since 1989 – has done nothing to convert him to ...”

“... his kingdom, others that as a defender of the Church he was a martyr’ – positions which T.S. Eliot echoed in Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Becket’s death was shocking, but his canonisation as a saint in 1173 was far from a foregone conclusion. The French pressed for it, but it was bitterly opposed by those English bishops who recognised it as a ...”

“... saith the Lord This was not what she, etc. If this had been found among the juvenilia of T.S. Eliot one might have thought it really something, but its value in the present context seems dubious. Not surprisingly, the earliest diaries are the worst. ‘Very foggy all morning, and we did not go out. Stella went to Laura, and was away for luncheon and ...”

“... vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both Henry James and T.S. Eliot used the deadly word ‘provincial’. Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste ... diamond rings on every ...”

“... first girlfriend in Paris. Now we are promised the text of a (dullish) letter from T.S. Eliot, who took French lessons for a while from Fournier. The quest continues. For 1986, the centenary of Henri’s birth, Carcanet have brought out Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life by David Arkell, describing him as ‘the noted literary sleuth’. This, I ...”

“... Ever have guessedWhat was behind that innocent face,    Drumming, drumming!And T.S. Eliot wrote to congratulate the Daily Mail on their benign attitude towards the gallows, an attitude ‘in striking contrast with the flaccid sentimentality of other papers I have seen, which have been so impudent as to affirm that they represented the great ...”

“... suggests there is something wrong with it, or, perhaps, something wrong with the reader. T.S. Eliot said that it meant ‘so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it’, which makes most readers feel that they’re too late to qualify. Sebastian Barry is a poet who has written a novel, so we must see what we can ...”

“... Fisher King will remain unhealed as a result of his failure to speak. Perceval’s unfulfilled task, in fact, was not to find an answer, but to ask a question. So far as he is concerned, the answer is beside the point. Several thousand lines later, he is told, without having to ask for the information, who is served from the grail (the father of the maimed ...”

“... the admission of women and the propriety of electing such eccentric and tasteless writers as T.S. Eliot. In fact the Academy has been less famous for the writers and artists it included than for those it didn’t (Hemingway, Dewey, Mencken, Salinger, Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis ...”

“... so tellingly in Romantic Image, published the following year. That story was identified with T.S. Eliot, who had first coined the phrase ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in a review-essay about the Metaphysical poets in 1921 – to challenge it in such forthright terms smacked of lèse-majesté even in the dog years of ...”