“... 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 ...”

“... known, is in when Waugh is out, and among literary ARP wardens with complicated love lives, T.S. Eliot is surely as noteworthy as Greene. For all of which the first part of the book tells a good story and casts sharp sidelights on the mythology of the Blitz, to which the writers were not always inclined to subscribe. Macaulay’s article for Time and Tide ...”

“... volume, the liftshaft, was published by Faber in 1937. He has been unhelpfully influenced by T.S. Eliot: Delenda est Carthago! (ses bains de mer, ses plages fleuries, And Dido on her lilo à sa proie attachée) Tudor Lancaster was famous by the time Drayneflete appeared and had been since 1939, when he invented the pocket (as distinct from the ...”

“... minstrel, and put it to use in his own public readings, though without the burned cork. T.S. Eliot revered Marie Lloyd, and the present queen’s grandmother, the hatchet-faced Queen Mary, was an improbable fan of Albert Chevalier’s East End knees-up ‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road’. Walter Sickert was obsessed with music hall, and Rudyard ...”

“... in trays of second-hand pulp, but haunts the libraries, loos and luggage of people like T.S. Eliot, Ronald Knox, Eric Newby, Vladimir Nabokov and Umberto Eco. He even made it into Edmund Wilson’s bedroom. Although Holmes is a private detective, he’s frequently consulted by Scotland Yard and repeatedly succeeds where it fails. This leads Haia ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But the mere uncounted folk Of whose life and death is none Report or lamentation. When T.S. Eliot, in the course of an essay of fine advocacy, identifies, as a weakness, Kipling’s lack of ‘inner compulsion’, the absence of a Figure in the Carpet, he overlooks Kipling’s uncommon fascination with the common man and the common woman – his ...”

“... and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in Criterion, with cold common sense: ‘Perhaps the most significant thing about the War is its insignificance; and it is this insignificance which makes it so acutely tragic. Perhaps fear of war is now rather an incentive, than a preventive, of ...”

“... The writing and presentation of a verse play is fraught with traditional dangers of the kind T.S. Eliot encountered and Auden described when he wrote that Eliot took ‘the only possible line. Except at a few unusual moments, he kept the style Drab.’ Raine, in his preface to The Electrification, showed that he was ...”

“... his qualities of discernment and generosity (he wanted to make a magazine where he himself, Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis could appear regularly – an annexe to the Vortex – but was determined to accept anything that had quality). Much of the detail lacks interest, however, and it is hard to avoid the ungrateful reflection that, since the fine ...”

“... Chekhov and Ibsen, the only foreigners established in the British dramatic repertoire. The task of the actors is to assist Miller’s interpretation. He is not much pleased by the performances he saw in his youth, nor by reports of older performances: he has always been concerned to reject what he calls ‘traditional’ conceptions of the roles, and ...”