“... poisoned the minds of the ‘neo-Christian’ literary critics of the past generation, with T.S. Eliot at the vanguard, and they in turn are eager to poison the minds of students by twisting courageous, radical works of art into expressions of a rancid piety. In Empson’s very Nietzschean account, Christianity celebrates the ‘unnatural’; it has a deadly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be mindful of the survival here of an old England lived in by people like the middle-aged T.S. Eliot, exponents of a disgusted chastity. So the piece was solicitous in trying to alleviate the shocks by explaining that the novelist himself was shocked. And I think it was right to argue that the book has its ‘strict disclaimers’ and that goodness of ...”

“... central heating and agriculture. Like Hitler, he condemned jazz as decadent. When T.S. Eliot came for a private audience Pacelli lectured him on literature. When Orson Welles came he pretended to a vast knowledge of Hollywood gossip. Similarly, he claimed to be fluent in almost every European language, though Evelyn Waugh noted that all he could ...”

“... short-circuit this sometimes produces is as revealing (thanks for pointing out that echo of T.S. Eliot, Paul!) as it is disconcerting (shouldn’t we have seen that for ourselves?). How much of Muldoon does depend on picking up what are essentially in-jokes? Never mind the content, the very form of a Muldoon poem is likely to constitute a coded ...”

“... engravers who processed his illustrations and, to wrap things up, a ‘lost entry’ in George Eliot’s journal, recording ‘Mr Thackeray’s passing’. This last was clearly inspired by Peter Ackroyd’s imaginary conversation between Chatterton, T.S. Eliot, Dickens and Oscar Wilde in his biography of the Great ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of its own world, and of course the people inside it. A single topic occupies our minds. ’Tis hinted at or boldly blazoned in Our accents, clothes and ways of eating fish, and being introduced and taking leave, ‘Farewell’, ‘So long’, ‘Bunghosky’, ‘Cheeribye’ – That topic all-absorbing, as it was, Is now and ever shall be, to us ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was soon to write ‘The Fly’. Around the corner, as it were, downstream at Lausanne, was T.S. Eliot, granted sick leave by his bank to recover from a breakdown caused by his marriage. He had brought with him a long poem... A mile or so upstream from Sierre, at Muzot, was Rainer Maria Rilke, whose Duino Elegies, held in suspension throughout the war, would ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Shaw argues, ‘now you have exposition, situation and discussion; and the discussion is the test of the playwright.’ This argument seems a little dubious when applied to Ibsen (if the final argument between Nora and Torvald in A Doll’s House is a ‘discussion’, the term applies to every non-violent climactic scene in dramatic literature). But ...”