“... 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 ...”

“... go on While we forget, and are Forgotten like a star That shoots and is gone. On this earth ’tis sure We men have not made Anything that doth fade So soon, so long endure. ‘Roads’ avoids definite starts and stops: living and dying become continuous, just as Thomas’s favourite enjambed rhyme slides ‘are’ into ‘forgotten’, like the trace of ...”

“... sickly London child Samuel Palmer was sent to Thanet to convalesce; sea-bathing and sermons. T.S. Eliot nursed his soul-sickness at the Albermarle Hotel in Cliftonville. Such indulgences have been suspended: now perfectly healthy urbanites, pricked by subliminally induced desires, descend on Junction 2 of the M25. They follow the yellow signs to Bluewater. No ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... will fight impertinent biographers through the courts (like J.D. Salinger). They will (like T.S. Eliot or Jack London) set up vigilant estates to stand like pyramids over the author’s reputation and defy any tomb-robbing researcher. They will themselves incinerate mountains of correspondence (as did Dickens) or enjoin survivors to do it for them (like ...”

“... that neither the boasts nor the admissions of defeat are to be read too literally: his poetic task is both ‘impossible and imperative’. Nancy Gish’s book is the most critically acute of a number of recent studies, and she very effectively dispatches the notion that the later poetry reveals an inexorable decline.* She concludes with praise of the ...”

“... role in a hilariously bad production in Great Expectations. When he agonisedly wonders whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings etc he is assailed by contradictory cries from the audience: ‘Some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said “Toss up for it”; and quite a Debating ...”

“... as an escape from all that science would bring to our attention. While contemporaries such as Eliot or Pound yearned to attribute to the modern poet the objectivity of a professional scientist, as illustrated by Eliot’s famous comparison in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ of a poet’s mind in action with ...”

“... By 1907, James was with the Whartons in Paris for a two-month stay, and she wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in praise of her visitor’s character (not his works): ‘The more one knows him the more one wonders – admires the mixture of wisdom – tolerance, of sensitiveness – sympathy, that makes his heart even more interesting to contemplate than his ...”

“... of her book is that, beyond all the sound and fury, Baudelaire was a good Catholic boy. T.S. Eliot gave some plausible reasons for taking Baudelaire’s tortured relation with Catholicism seriously, but, though Richardson cites Eliot, she does not emulate him. Indeed her own counterpart to Starkie is the truly demented ...”

“... like nursery rhymes, on the compelling force of dreams’: why couldn’t he be friends with T.S. Eliot? (Happily, he never knew that Eliot called him Shitwell and said of the whole Sitwell enterprise that it bore ‘a little the air of smattering’.) Soon after New Bearings, Osbert would publish a riposte called ...”

“... arbitrary preferences).     All this is perhaps no more than a rephrasing of what T.S. Eliot meant when he said that Donne picked out ideas because he was ‘interested in the feeling they give’ – only I would argue that what Eliot observes is not an individual aberration on Donne’s part but, however we may ...”