“... freedom from ‘fixed points’, gave to many members of the intelligentsia, among them T.S. Eliot, was repeated seven years later with the advent of daytime broadcasting on the Third’s wavelength. The Music Programme was steadily expanded, until in 1965 it occupied the whole of each weekday before Network Three’s successor, Study Session, came ...”

“... prose has its own duties to perform and will not pay close attention to the heroine. The prose’s task is stupefaction; this stupor may mirror the emotional state of the protagonist, but that is only a coincidence. The prose mimics catatonia because fugue states are the foundation of any prose that wishes to be contemporary. Maurice Blanchot’s novels might ...”

“... Indian and Sri Lankan contributors are pictured with their white, establishment collaborators T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and William Empson. It’s no wonder that Portland Place seemed the world’s omphalos. Sandhu also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great ...”

“... Bellow signals a protagonist’s status by listing his contacts (‘Conrad Aiken praised him, T.S. Eliot took favourable notice of his poems, and even Yvor Winters had a good word to say for him’ – Humboldt’s Gift); Roth often writes as a fictionalised version of himself, an internationally recognised writer approached by characters who want him to write ...”

“... complications ensue. The third interlude imagines a conversation between Chatterton, Wilde, T.S. Eliot and Dickens – all Ackroydian subjects (‘William Blake will be joining us shortly,’ Chatterton says). The fifth interlude recounts a face-to-face meeting between Dickens and Ackroyd (‘Some of my best friends are biographers,’ Dickens says. It’s ...”

“... in modern Europe – Culture and Imperialism takes on an even more difficult and subtle task with the imperial arts. If it is relatively clear how historians, social scientists, demographers, anthropologists and colonial administrators deployed their ‘sciences’ to dominate subject peoples, it is considerably less clear how Jane Austen’s ...”

“... aside. Ruth Nevo, for example, in 1972 dismissed the question as ‘misconceived’. Jenkins isn’t so dismissive, but he does say one very odd thing, which I imagine others have pointed out: in the second footnote on page 137, he says that the word delay is ‘never used by or of Hamlet in the play’. This must be wrong, since Hamlet certainly does use ...”

“... American culture. She searched for role models among famous women writers of her day – George Eliot, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet as Christanne Miller points out, Dickinson didn’t actively support the political campaign for women’s rights ‘or, apparently, sympathise with women generally’. It is in the radical new language of the ...”

“... essential isolation of man and the difficulty of communication’. What is the poet’s task? It is to put ‘into words those sudden desolations and happiness that descend on us uninvited there where we each are within our lonely rooms never really entered by anybody else and from which we never emerge.’ And this is not only the business of his ...”

“... those who found Partisan Review an alternative to callow nativism, a transatlantic lifeline to Eliot, Malraux, Silone. To give the roll-call of magazines, as Jumonville does, is to tell off from the New York Review of Books by way of Dissent, the New Republic, the New Leader, Commentary and the Nation, without exhausting the list. And almost all of the ...”

“... Longley and Muldoon. These writers were led to him by content but stayed for the style. Auden or Eliot’s influence can be overwhelming for a writer, their tone is so settled, their territory staked out so thoroughly. But a novice poet can wander around perfectly happily for years in MacNeice’s enormous and baggy Collected Poems and emerge with a decent ...”

“... of historical violence. A different speech is coming from the silence of the church. T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, naming the private places where insight takes place, calls one of them ‘the draughty church at smokefall’. At its highest and most serious moments, its most searching inquiries into the human, the Renaissance theatre in England ...”

“... might have gone on, if Pound hadn’t disappeared into funny money, the Cantos and obloquy, or Eliot into verse drama and High Anglicanism. Bunting’s Complete Poems are a tantalisingly small and pure uchronia, and as for his life, his model in these things was Walter Raleigh. A Life of Bunting, then, was for many years the most obviously ...”

“... to use a medium as precisely as possible, but knowing fully its basic imprecision? A hopeless task, but none the less rewarding for being hopeless.’ This is good Modernist doctrine, and a whole slew of writers and critics from Mallarmé to Adorno would certainly sign the manifesto. But the proposition doesn’t describe what happens in Durrell’s ...”

“... performance among friends. He could do low-life street talk or a delicious impersonation of T.S. Eliot. Cummings always cited Ezra Pound as his main influence in terms of the visual organisation of words and lines on the page, and the use of line lengths and spacing to follow the patterns of speech. The two first met in Paris shortly after the end of the ...”