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“... what the editor describes as ‘the most comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of T.S. Eliot’s work as it appeared’. There are other such collections, but this one will be enough for most people. The editor is American, and she is contributing to a series which gives the same treatment to Emerson, Edith Wharton, Ellen ...”

“... next century. It is hard to find instances that she has missed. She could have had Betjeman and Eliot – Prufrock after all exists largely through his clothes. But I doubt many men born since 1918 could equal the precision of ‘my collar mounting firmly to the chin,/My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin’. As for descriptions of ...”

“... The release in 2009 of the first two volumes of T.S. Eliot’s letters, and the year before of the final volume of Katherine Mansfield’s, raises questions about the relationship between these two and their spouses, Vivien Haigh-Wood and John Middleton Murry.* Why was Eliot distrustful, and even apprehensive, of Mansfield? What was Murry’s relationship with Vivien – and indeed with Eliot himself? Why were Vivien’s feelings about Murry so tortured – and was Mansfield jealous of her? There can be no doubt that Eliot was deeply suspicious of Mansfield, and there is plenty of evidence that she observed him closely and accurately ...”

“... Historians of Victorian women’s writing have found this a particularly unappealing task. George Eliot’s steady opposition to women’s suffrage is an embarrassment, and it is not encouraging to find Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell united in their distaste for the robust feminist arguments of John Stuart Mill. ‘In short, J.S. Mill’s head is, I ...”

“... Emily Hale​ was Eliot’s ‘Raspberrymouth’. That’s what he called her in the love letters they began exchanging in 1927, a correspondence that intensified in the early 1930s, and continued through the awkward years of their disentanglement after the death of his first wife, Vivien, in 1947. Eliot’s love for Emily, his ‘Tall Girl’, retained all the shy ardour he felt when he first met her as a young student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1912 ...”

“... that Pope himself began to provide from the time of the Variorum version, rather like those that Eliot was to add to The Waste Land, may be parodic, but they also genuinely advertise the weird erudition of his creation. So we require notes to Pope’s notes, and this before we have confronted the problem of the different versions of the poem. In the standard ...”

“... Poetry Revival of those years needed to counterbalance the waning radical commitments of the post-Eliot Faber list. Reprinting Finlay’s 1960 volume The Dancers Inherit the Party in 1969, with a few poems added, Montgomery presented it as a first edition rather than what it effectively was, a third. With anyone else an erratum slip might have sufficed, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... His loyalties were separate if indivisible, and decades later he corrected his publisher T.S. Eliot’s reference to him – not Welsh, but ‘a Londoner of Welsh and English descent’. He was encouraged to draw from early on – the urge to convey the look of things was as involuntary ‘as stroking a cat’ – and, at his own insistence, was sent at ...”