“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence,’ T.S. Eliot wrote at the beginning of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. How would such an essay go on if it were to begin ‘In Irish writing ...’ and if it were to consider the plight of the novelist? We begin with language. How different words sound on our ...”

“... college – in the collection of memorabilia of such Christian writers as George MacDonald, T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams and Tolkien. It is evidence of some sort of fame. A.N. Wilson sees ‘unmistakable and remarkable evidence of something like sanctification which occurred in him towards the end of his days’, but that I do not pretend to be able to ...”

“... The New York Trilogy is steeped in the American urban wasteland as recorded in the early T.S. Eliot, or in Melville’s ‘Bartleby’. In addition, Paul Auster is a gifted parodist who does for the thriller and private-eye novel much of what Henry James in Washington Square did for the amorous ...”

“... from the politicians. This was hardly necessary, since most of the politicians looked like T.S. Eliot and most of the poets looked like Michael Foot – with Mary Wilson as one of the exceptions. Although I warned the heroine of Mrs Wilson’s Diary that I was a journalist, she favoured me with her political opinions (sound, I thought, if unorthodox) and I ...”

“... on serious questions, it is one’s duty to use silly metaphors on serious questions ... It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it. I can recall this last persuasion as potent with the generation approaching adulthood in Chesterton’s prime. How often was I told over cocoa or mulled wine with devoutly disposed young men, that Savonarola ...”

“... that you get excellent teas in Manchester, or conversing freezingly about refrigerators with T.S. Eliot. But even here gaiety broke in and was posthumously triumphant. To a number of her literary friends and admirers she bequeathed looking-glasses. Raisley Moorsom, described in one place by Mrs Spurling as having known Margaret and Ivy ‘almost from the ...”

“... as if the movement of French or Irish underlaid it, a feeling perceived no doubt by T.S. Eliot when in 1934 he accepted for the Criterion a poem by the 21-year-old George Barker called ‘Daedalus’, a poem which today seems remarkably to combine the flavour of the period with an already complete mastery of this linguistic ‘glide’. Where florid ...”

“... Thus the prominent Anglo-American critics from 1900 to 1950 – for example, Leavis, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling – produce essentially essayistic work, legislating, setting up evaluative hierarchies, and at their worst, attitudinising. The major Central and East European critics of this period – figures like ...”

“... statement, opinion, allegation, accusation etc) to be false; to disprove by argument’. When T.S. Eliot (in Murder in the Cathedral) wrote If you make charges, Then in public I will refute them, and when Rebecca West wrote The case against most of them must have been so easily refuted that they could hardly rank at suspects, both writers could be assured that ...”

“... near Le Havre. In photographs this dark genius has the leanness and meticulous parting of T.S. Eliot, the milky eyes of Enoch Powell, and a monocle that is his signature affectation; the lens of his probity. In March 1916, he became Independent MP for East Hertfordshire, touting protofascist policies: Jewish ghettos and yellow stars; anti-German and ...”

“... in the eyes of UK Immigration. In a happy accident, this made the book eligible for the T.S. Eliot Prize, which it won last year. It also shows how much the migrant artist must always depend on the approval of the ...”

“... soon appear in his first book, but he was not happy with them. And neither was anybody else. T.S. Eliot sent them back from the Criterion with a note to the effect that one of them was ‘almost good’ and Berryman was not as dismayed as he might have been when Malcolm Cowley called another batch ‘very skilful exercises, based on the very best ...”

“... and apprehension characteristic of parts of Autumn Journal follow on from the fact that, as T.S. Eliot, the poem’s original publisher remarked, ‘the imagery is all imagery of things lived through, and not merely chosen for poetic suggestiveness.’ MacNeice, anxiously ‘Listening to bulletins/From distant, measured voices/Arguing for peace/While the ...”

“... an inner necessity. Bavink, a painter, ‘wished he could just give up painting, but that wasn’t so simple either: what’s inside you wants to come out.’ The downfall of these would-be artists is money. As Koekebakker, the narrator of ‘Young Titans’, says: ‘There’s a lot a person needs.’ Attempts to avoid those needs fail, one after ...”