“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... powers, and was further humiliated after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, another power began to test the identity of the West. By the end of the 19th century, Germany had not only united but had triumphed in the Franco-Prussian War and expanded its industrial capacity to overtake Britain’s. The promoters of the First World War in Britain and France left ...”

“... and Auden himself evidently felt he had been knocked about a bit. ‘Desmond MacCarthy took me to task severely,’ he told a young admirer back home in New York: ‘He’s the Grand Old Man of English criticism … now the publishers over there are advertising it as “that controversial volume”.’ Auden had endured controversy anyway since his move to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... art of winning friends and influencing people, recalls in his preface to The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (1960) that ‘at my one meeting with Mr Eliot, I offered to complete a book on his literary career without pestering him.’ When Kenner did inevitably pester, Eliot proved himself ...”

“... memorable epigrams. I had seen shadows of his invention in Borges, snatches of his thought in T.S. Eliot, echoes of his paradoxes in Larkin, and an allusion to his imagery in Nabokov (I’m thinking of the ‘democracy of ghosts’ in Pnin, which recalls Chesterton’s definition of tradition as ‘the democracy of the dead’). I thought, and still ...”

“... his reviled mother rejoices, while the hated Dr Block tactlessly observes: ‘Undulant fever ain’t so bad, Azzberry . . . It’s the same as Bang’s in a cow.’ ‘He must have drunk some unpasteurised milk up there,’ he hears his mother sigh as they leave the room. In fact the disease-bearing milk was consumed not in New York, but while undertaking ...”

“... that beset them.’ In 1944 she submitted a manuscript to Faber, only to have it rejected by T.S. Eliot personally. Despite this, the impulse to create did not, as she half feared, leave her. In 1945 she was still wrestling with what she realised were her besetting demons as a writer. ‘Oh heaven this effort not to say things – to suppress the ...”

“... to ever write anything lasting.’ ‘Cocteau was very brilliant the last time we met,’ T.S. Eliot told Stravinsky, ‘but he seemed to be rehearsing for a more important occasion.’ It’s a remark that returns us to Cocteau’s fascination with a perpetual adolescence – the ongoing crisis of all the possible persons you might be. But it turns out ...”

“... of his fiction, there are no railways, despite the many appearances of trains in his work: in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ‘modern life’ is described as stretching out its ‘steam feeler to this point three or four times a day’ and quickly withdrawing, as if what it found there was ‘uncongenial’. Wessex was where Hardy could stage his feeling ...”

“... illustrious journal Critique, which he took as a rite of passage: ‘I knew, after passing this test, that I could, if I wanted to, become an art historian.’ Bois later returned the favour when he asked Derrida to turn his notes concerning Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh into an article that Bois published in Macula, the journal he launched with Jean Clay in ...”