“... and-genius): the early 20th century. She discusses Zelda Fitzgerald and ‘Vivien(ne)’ Eliot, as well as a number of other ‘women often marginalised in the modernist memory project’, whom she calls her ‘eternal reference point … an invisible community’. Heroines is narrated by a voice that is never identified as ‘Kate Zambreno’, yet ...”

“... the intolerable Arthur Calvert in Late Call. There are traces of him all over the place. Even Bill Eliot, that successful barrister and adoring husband in The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, has a touch of him in his gambling and the financial irresponsibility that leaves his widow almost destitute. Sir Angus tells us that he felt ...”

“... Browning (‘Oh, to be in England’), Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) and T.S. Eliot (‘History is now and England’). I had got as far as setting out the rationale for such a book in a lecture at the British Academy when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by Paul Keegan and Christopher Ricks ...”

“... which does best from the deal; the city may even be ‘the image of time itself’. From T.S. Eliot – ‘a poet whose vision of time and eternity sprang directly from his experience of London’ – Ackroyd quotes the line ‘all time is unredeemable,’ adding that ‘London is unredeemable, too.’ In his 1993 LWT London Lecture, Ackroyd expressed his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has in mind is a form of what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion. On this view, the task of critique is to dig out hidden meanings and concealed contradictions in a text, scanning it for those symptomatic points at which it falters, deadlocks, disrupts its own logic or threatens to come apart at the seams. The critical act is one of unmasking ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them to lisp in numbers.Edmund Blunden at one point sent a batch of Douglas’s work to T.S. Eliot at Faber and Eliot’s response was encouraging. Douglas, though, made sure that he was not caught blushing. His reaction was to wonder how much he could get for Eliot’s ...”