“... obscurity is combined with an unusually heightened degree of awareness. No doubt this is what T.S. Eliot had in mind when he said that poets were both more primitive and more sophisticated than the average run of individuals. If God spans the whole of Creation, Peter Conrad runs him a close second. This is an astonishingly erudite work, one which would still ...”

“... I doubt that they ever found a large audience outside the academy or a few literary circles (T.S. Eliot and H.D. were two who fell under their influence). In the wider world, Harrison’s reputation rested on her public performances, where she stripped away the technicalities and was (as she put it herself in Reminiscences) ‘almost fatally ...”

“... English poet since Shakespeare to find a wholly new way of conveying think-speak in metre (T.S. Eliot was probably the second). This is clearest in ‘Felix Randal’, but is thoroughly evident too in such an oddly memorable poem as ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’ (‘The Eurydice, it concerned thee O Lord’). The trouble is that this colloquialism can ...”

“... of aligning biography with autobiography is often sidestepped by biographers less equal to their task than Stephen Gill, either by equating the ‘truth’ about a writer’s life with what that writer has specifically chosen not to reveal, or by accepting what he has revealed too literally. The first alternative is adopted by A.N. Wilson in his recent ...”

“... in 1917 seems to have been on the same scale of disaster as that other, more famous exile, T.S. Eliot, and to have led to a similar emotional wasteland. Clara left him in 1921, but not until her death in 1945 did he make a happier second marriage to Julia de Beausobre, who, after his death in 1960, wrote his biography. That book painfully records Namier’s ...”

“... of her last poems seemed to sweep the polarities of life and art (carefully separated by T.S. Eliot and the New Critics) into one unanswerably dramatic gesture of female defiance.’ Against this, Stevenson says that she wants to give ‘an objective account of how this exceptionally gifted girl was hurled into poetry by a combination of biographical ...”

“... instance of John Quinn, the New York lawyer to whose patronage the Yeats family, as well as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, owed so much. Yeats mistrusted ‘the New’, although he knew well enough what was going on; and after what seems to have been a quite serious nervous breakdown in 1915, which held him up for some years, he suddenly began to be serious ...”

“... to the end of his days he called it a ‘luncheon’ – held in his honour at the Trocadero. T.S. Eliot proposed the toast, but Wright says ‘the guests seem to have reacted ... in the way those who knew Lehmann tended to react: with respect, but a feeling, too, of slight absurdity.’ It had always been so. John Heath-Stubbs, in his Hindsights, describes a ...”

“... this book, in which Norbrook vindicates the political radicalism of Paradise Lost. Although T.S. Eliot and many others have presented the epic poet as in flight from politics to timeless truths, Norbrook insists that he remained the champion of the republic. Through careful study of allusion, verse structure and the interplay of Satanic and angelic ...”

“... around with an equally ferocious virtuosity. Now, down on the farm, it seems exactly equal to the task – as if to tractoring, milking, mucking out, performing these jobs with the wholly effective absence of enthusiasm which for a countryman often seems the nearest thing to enjoyment. But with this rain falling, animals and men could as well be on the ...”

“... to Shannon airport strike her in much the same way as those on the London Underground struck T.S. Eliot. ‘Mental emptiness’ is the phrase. A flu germ is lying in wait for her on the bus to Ralston’s Cove (somewhere in the south-west corner of Ireland). She arrives in a very seedy state. A doctor is summoned who proceeds to take her in hand. His name is ...”

“... irritated and baffled him. Instead, he attacked it whenever he had opportunity, speaking of T.S. Eliot as ‘a ninny, a conceited literary humbug’, and of James Joyce as ‘a literary charatan of the extremest order’. Frequently in his weekly causeries he wrote from this standpoint to an effect of arrogance which engendered an answering hostility on the ...”

“... Her own acquaintance among the uncommon of London expanded rapidly. She became friendly with T.S. Eliot, who called her ‘Pixie’; when her Ayer affair foundered, she had a fling with Graham Greene, who fed her on oysters and smoked salmon, and took her to see Charlie’s Aunt and King Lear. When the film star Maureen Swanson wanted 18th-century Chinese ...”

“... the ills of the world to their very existence. It needed Hilaire Belloc and Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, none of them native Britons, to introduce to English literature the programmatic hatred that mere distaste was too lazy to confect.’ Pearce, who doesn’t agree with Raphael’s characterisation of Belloc, shows to what anxious lengths Belloc went to ...”

“... By August 1900, Wilbur had designed and partly built a prototype powered glider, and was eager to test it. What he needed was a suitable laboratory: ideally, a coastal region with steady wind speeds and high dunes to launch from. He settled on a village called Kitty Hawk, in the Kill Devil Hills, a remote stretch of littoral on the Outer Banks of North ...”