“... of Urquhart’s frequent Classical quotations have been tracked down, which must have been no mean task, considering Urquhart’s habits of misquotation and misattribution. And most of the innumerable more or less obscure Scots soldiers and savants that Urquhart mentions have been located, so that this edition will be very useful for anyone dealing with ...”

“... Tory politicians like Lord Hugh Thomas, the distinguished historian of Spain and Cuba, see the task of historians as the creation of a usable past which will confirm the version of history peddled in the popular press, furnish yet another justification of their claim to authority and boost the sagging morale of an embittered populace. We therefore face ...”

“... Once upon a time the novelist’s task was to be realistic and to tell a story that was lifelike, convincing and ‘sincere’. Today’s novelists are counter-Aristotelians, spinners of tall tales and colourful yarns, engaged, as it seems, in some eternal childlike competition to impress their hearers and see who can get away with telling the biggest whopper ...”

“... with ‘an elaborate and rather unintelligible composition in the latest fashionable style of T.S. Eliot’. He is beaten by Jay, who had the sense to play safe ‘with a series of sonnets in the manner of Matthew Arnold, Wordsworth and Keats’. At Oxford, he loudly proclaims his intention of competing for the Chancellor’s English Essay prize, only to ...”

“... would a future for Fish as someone like, say, Walt Disney have seemed amiss. But Fish as T.S. Eliot we just can’t swallow. The success of this particular game depends on the appropriateness of the linkages effected. For poor Mr Quelch – the formidable form master – Hughes crosses A.E. Housman with Jack the Ripper. It really isn’t a suitable ...”

“... in Australia. There is nothing comparable to the influence of Walt Whitman, Henry James or T.S. Eliot, say, on contemporary English practice and critical attitudes, or of Ruben Dario and Luis Borges on the practice of their craft in Spain. Nor is anything of the sort yet in sight. I have perhaps wandered rather far from the book I have ostensibly set out to ...”

“... writing of what he approvingly termed ‘decreative’ Modernist poets in a 1966 essay on T.S. Eliot, suggested that one way of recognising them ‘is by a certain ambiguity in your own response. The Waste Land, and also Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, can strike you in certain moments as emperors without clothes ... It is with your own proper fictive covering that ...”

“... to a ‘liberating scorn of a wind that makes everything healthy by making everything run’. T.S. Eliot thought highly of him and D.H. Lawrence found in him ‘a gentleman’, ‘a pure mind’ less degrading than Dostoevsky’s. Nor have academics lagged in appreciating his virtues. There have been many studies of the Satyricon in the 20th century. Most of ...”

“... that she had not expected Newbolt ‘to be a man of humanity, nor to be the man who brought T.S. Eliot to a wider public’. Her researches found these things to be the case none the less, also that ‘he wasn’t even completely English,’ since his mother was descended from Jewish immigrants, and that so far from coming from an establishment family he was ...”

“... no right and left, no before and after. Creation is a kind of completed block, in which, as T.S. Eliot has it in the Four Quartets, ‘all time is eternally present,’ and time’s arrow can as easily shoot backwards as forwards. As Canales writes, using quotations from Hermann Weyl’s book Space-Time-Matter of 1922 – that year again – it was thanks to ...”

“... writer H.P. Lovecraft is economically invoked with the single phrase, ‘a gibbous moon’. T.S. Eliot is constantly quoted by Edith Cadiz both before and after her disappearance; she passes round a hat that once belonged to him after she does her strip. The scarlet-haired opium addict, Mary Butts, makes a brief guest appearance and Sinclair borrows a ...”

“... that the poetry of the left was ‘pictureless, unhuman, [un]dramatic’ by comparison with T.S. Eliot. An early poem, ‘In a Coffee Pot’, published in the first issue of Partisan Review – he was on the editorial board – describes the struggle of his generation, ‘the bright boys’, who had done everything they were told to do and yet had no ...”

“... These are the words of Saskia Hamilton, the poet who has undertaken the arduous and complicated task of editing this selection. She remarks in her introduction that the letters differ from the poetry in that they ‘are not reshaped, dismantled and made again in the daylight of his attention’: they ‘have the immediacy of the first rhythm and the first ...”

“... virtuosic Arnaut Daniel (Dante’s miglior fabbro or ‘better craftsman’ – a compliment T.S. Eliot borrowed in dedicating The Waste Land to Pound). Despite moments of irritating preciosity, Pound often strikes a pure and authentic note, as in this archetypal stanza from the poet who called himself Cercamon (‘Circle-the-world’): Of love I have naught ...”

“... of antiquity is broadening and changing. Yet it is sobering to remember that this is where T.S. Eliot came in: when he went to Harvard he was able to study Indian literature and thought, and the study of Sanskrit and its epics seemed to have come to stay. Shantih shantih ...”