“... 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 ...”

“... In his essay on Lancelot Andrewes, T.S. Eliot wrote about ‘relevant intensity’. Contemporary British and American writers are in love with what might be called irrelevant intensity. In fiction, information has become the new character, and information is endless. We know the signs of irrelevant intensity: an obsession with pop-culture trivia; a love of the comedy of culture rather than the comedy of character; zany scenes interrupted by essayistic riffs – on hotel minibars, on videophones, on the semiotics of street manners in major European cities, what have you – the riffs always expertly blending the sentimental and the Cultural-Studies-theoretical; a tendency to elongate into lists whenever possible (of the ‘there were ten things that Brian really disliked’ kind); kooky epigraphs, mixing high and low authorities; long, feverish run-on sentences, desperately semaphoring their gross mimetic appetite, their need to capture as much of ‘the madness of the times’ as possible, as much of ‘the way we live now’; and a frequent oiling of italics ...”

“... was the third version of ‘On Being Ill’ to appear in print – the first was published by T.S. Eliot in the New Criterion of 1926; the essay also surfaced again in two collections edited by Leonard Woolf after Virginia’s death. As Lee’s introduction makes clear, these various incarnations are far from identical, but the history she outlines sorts ...”

“... poets in different eras have been fond of rare words, as the recent examples of Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens will suggest.) Finally, it does no justice whatever to the richness of this particular text to think, for example, of the transcendent meteorological and zoological panorama of the Voice from the Whirlwind as a ‘compendium list’. We ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with literature into rational generalisations about the way everyone thinks and feels.What T.S. Eliot observed of his own critical assertions also applies to Johnson’s: ‘I am convinced that their force comes from the fact that they are attempts to summarise, in conceptual form, direct and intense experience of the poetry that I have found most ...”

“... and the English Language’ and with the ‘plain English’ therapists for whom the austere T.S. Eliot had his own apocalyptic vision just before Orwell uttered his, seeing language asshabby equipment always deterioratingIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,Undisciplined squads of ...”

“... of the great are delineated for posterity by the Chronicle. Balanchine, Ingmar Bergman, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Giacometti, Graves, Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest ...”

“... The author has written a biography of Yeats and critical studies of Orwell, Lawrence and T.S. Eliot. Bunting knew Yeats and Eliot; he may or may not have met Orwell. He truly detested Lawrence, first for locking him out on a window-ledge at a party (in Paris, I think) and then for slipping him some hashish baked into a ...”

“... authority to miracles which had been reported in Flemish villages. In 1606, on his deathbed, the test which any self-respecting Stoic must pass, he renounced the ‘vanities’ of pagan philosophy in favour of the Cross, and asked that his prize possession, his furred robes, be placed at the altar of the Church of St Peter in Louvain. To posterity, the ...”

“... to his literary or contemporary allusions. Who but a pedant would say of Shakespeare what T.S. Eliot wrote of Jonson, that he ‘cannot be understood without study’? Eliot was enjoining an immersion in Jonson’s writings, not in their intellectual hinterland, but the explanatory apparatus of the new edition brings ...”

“... opposition’ not a feature of Parliament in the 18th century.11 February. A piece in the TLS by Laura Freeman about how hunger was reflected in the novels of the postwar period. I suppose it’s because it’s to do with novels (and therefore middle class and upwards), but it hardly relates to my own childhood memories. I have no particular memories ...”

“... 30 March 1965, ‘we are being told by Secretary McNamara and others that this war is a decisive test for the future. It will decide the future of “wars of liberation”. This is a profoundly and dangerously false notion, and it shows a lamentable lack of knowledge and understanding of the revolutionary upheavals of the epoch in which we live.’ Lippmann ...”

“... High Holborn, and he incorporated into his verse Baudelaire’s words (soon to be reused by T.S. Eliot) ‘Mon semblable, mon frère’. Aldington could mix ‘Helen of Sparta,/ Dryope, Laodamia’ with ‘a whore in Oxford street’, but generally his Greece represents an ideal of love and beauty that isn’t always convincing when the diction is that of ...”