“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find themselves confronting a shrewd scholar who denies them the luxury of easy retort – he lashes out from ...”

“... disappeared as a coherent work. The other inhabitant of Locust Street at this time was T.S. Eliot. Born in 1888 at no 2635 (presumably a long way from Crawford’s Theatre), he lived there until 1905, when he began his own journey to Parnassus via the appropriately named Milton Academy in Massachusetts, followed by Harvard and then Paris, Oxford and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Second Coming’ and ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’; and reviewed Ulysses, Marianne Moore (by T.S. Eliot), Charlie Chaplin, Gertrude Stein, Pirandello, Hemingway and Al Jolson. Just about the only body of avant-garde work that was missing was that of the Russians, from whom the Dial shied away because of the editors’ cautious politics. Through the ...”

“... comedy, as in literature, takes some unexpected twists and, like the tradition described by T.S. Eliot, ‘does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations’. Morecambe and Wise were themselves influenced by solo comedians: Morecambe was a great fan of Buster Keaton and Phil Silvers, and his incompetent ventriloquist act clearly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of them were oblivious of their importance to him. Some, such as his Highgate schoolmaster T.S. Eliot and his Oxford nemesis C.S. Lewis, had been in post since his youth, but new figures continually joined them. One was Nikolaus Pevsner, who by some quirk of mandarin humour was knighted the same year as Betjeman. Hillier struggles, unconvincingly, to find ...”

“... the light of the scruples of history? And how do readers judge whether it works, when they can’t test it against the ‘truth’? This is on board ship in 1818 (Agnes is James Laidlaw’s daughter-in-law, about to give birth): ‘You should go and say farewell to your native land and the last farewell to your mother and father for you will not be seeing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But Gay makes no mention of this accumulating literature. While he points, in discussing T.S. Eliot, to the self-contradictory nature of a good deal of the modern impulse, he is not willing to go on to acknowledge that political modern and cultural modern had a symbiotic relationship. Though Hitler read little, he did highlight a passage in a 1923 book by ...”

“... gnarled paws and a voice like a buttock. He has been reading Homer and got some ideas. He doesn’t so much tell me his ideas as carve me with them. Cy is a Special Level Donor. He’ll up the annual donation by half if they get artists doing some real art not just bullshit brushstrokes.GilesCy’s son is deaf. He brings him to the dinner to perform ...”