“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... want to claim that everyone took enthusiastically to the new Jamesian multiverse. The young T.S. Eliot, another disciple of Bradley, was dismayed to find, rather as James had observed, that Bradley’s final achievement was, paradoxically, to advertise the pluralism of the world which he had sought monistically to correct: the world had proved incorrigibly ...”

“... 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 ...”