“... Waugh thought Coward agreeable enough but with ‘no brains’.Sometimes he retaliated. T.S. Eliot wrote pompously in an essay on drama: ‘I do not suppose for a moment that Mr Coward has ever spent one hour in the study of ethics.’ ‘I do not think that would have helped me,’ Coward replied, ‘but I think it would have done Mr ...”

“... Heaney’s splicing of contemporary unhappiness and prehistoric savagery was the example of T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land mingled the desolations of Lower Thames Street and Margate sands with the ancient fertility cults involving human sacrifice that he had read about in James Frazer and Jessie Weston. Heaney’s late modernist credentials are strong and ...”

“... out to wrest the literature of the period from what they saw as the political conservatism of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. For them, the illocutionary force of talking about ‘literature and politics’ was to say ‘I am a young radical who wants to show the value to the left of writing from this period.’ David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic is ...”

“... first detective novel’, was published in 1862, six years before The Moonstone, which T.S. Eliot, not altogether correctly, called ‘the first, the longest and the best’ of detective novels. The Female Detective, a collection of stories, came soon afterwards in 1864, and Revelations of a Lady Detective the same year; all were serialised. The Notting ...”

“... they argue, ‘allows the variety of meanings he actually intends.’ The close reader’s task is to recognise the simultaneous presence of conflicting possibilities, and find a meaning embracing ‘as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning’. The young William Empson, who had been reading Graves for some while, adapted this ...”

“... and became the sacrificial muses who inspired his poetry.’ Lowell grew up revering T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound (‘I ask you to have me,’ he wrote to Pound as a college freshman), but in the 1950s, famous after the publication of the technically masterful Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946, he started to feel stultified by the modernism ...”

“... recommended in the respective governments’ instructions to their dual citizens. How right T.S. Eliot was, if on a more mundane level than he intended, to advise travellers that ‘You are not the same people who left that station/Or who will arrive at any terminus.’Passports as a prerequisite for travelling to foreign countries came in with the First ...”

“... a pattern of ‘timeless moments’, but what does Mr Baker make of the years since 1942 when T.S. Eliot stood in the failing winter light of his ‘secluded chapel’ and knew so surely that ‘History is now and England’? Mr Baker shows a marked tendency to opt out. He declares the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II his formal end-point, but has trouble ...”

“... first, and probably best-known book, Opera as Drama, which combines the dramatic criticism of T.S. Eliot, Una EllisFermor and Francis Fergusson with a highly selective view of operatic history. As with Taruskin and Josephson, the merging of the historical with the systematic sharpens the perception and makes sense of the material, with the difference that the ...”

“... One can only agree with that ‘poet, playwright, critic, editor and publisher’, T.S. Eliot (whose later life, Richard Ellmann informs us, ‘became rather stately’): ‘I did not know death had undone so many.’ When originally conceived, Lee observed that ‘national biography must be prepared to satisfy the commemorative instinct of all ...”

“... elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his abortive mission to India. Working for the BBC gave Orwell the experience, however unwelcome, of functioning as an individual ...”

“... Lives is to come across the name of one person after another who did this: Tallulah Bankhead, T.S. Eliot, Sheilah Graham, Ernest Hemingway. To be sure, Mellow is undoubtedly correct in asserting that the Fitzgeralds had it worse than most. But this is hardly news. Their version is by now a cliché of American literary history. We all know that, for Scott and ...”

“... world that informed its making. Usually, we rely on the notion of ‘style’ to help with this task, to connect the work to the individual manner of its creator as well as to the collective Kunstwollen (or ‘artistic will’) of its culture. As the index of the artist and the period, ‘style’ is crucial to the chronological basis of the ...”

“... I speak passionately,/that’s when I’m least to be trusted.’ Alluding to T.S. Eliot, Glück has written that ‘you cannot be so alert to a species of agony without having felt it,’ and admits that she understands our desire to read poems autobiographically. But she isn’t trying to express the truth of a particular feeling self: she is ...”

“... civilisation of Europe. The critics who saw the poem in this solemn light, particularly T.S. Eliot and E.R. Curtius, had obvious reasons for wanting to believe in a southern European classic which was supranational and religious. To these conservatively inclined modernists Dante’s theological and political vision was the ultimate antidote to ...”