“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... contains an excursus on ‘Belief and Poetry’ in the form of a challenging discussion with T.S. Eliot and his notion of poetry as ‘the emotional equivalent of thought’. This essay was among the first and remains the most illuminating of the many studies in which critics have portrayed Rilke as ‘the poet of a world of which the philosopher is ...”

“... by other ‘improvised Europeans’ like Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, T.S. Eliot and Pound. His interpreters haven’t ignored or condoned his obsession, but neither have they explored its possible bearing on other aspects of his thought and personality. He seems to have looked upon Jews as an unsavoury mix of the ‘oriental’ and the ...”

“... been all vitally indispensable.’ Someone who cared for tradition, as his fellow American T.S. Eliot so passionately cared for it, would not have introduced that old-English phrase ‘Christmas-tide’ into such promiscuous cosmopolitan company: the effect is brilliant but socially ‘smart’, which indeed is the general note of his letters (some of his ...”

“... Over sixty years ago Ezra Pound slashed a pencil through a verbose typescript by his friend T.S. Eliot, with results that are famous. More recently, Wendy Cope gave The Waste Land fresh scrutiny and decided that the job could be done pretty well in the space of five limericks. The first of these goes: In April one seldom feels cheerful; Dry stones, sun and ...”

“... talent for making people supercilious. But the derision itself – from his earliest reviewers to Eliot’s influential essay of 1930, ‘Arnold and Pater’, and even sometimes to Donoghue – is telling. So much animus spells some complicity. And some doubt about how to make sense of Pater, when he kept himself to his sentences. Modern biographers, thwarted ...”

“... at being in their company when he goes on to cite a long list of famous admirers including T.S. Eliot, Auden, Dorothy Parker, Wittgenstein and Cardinal Hume. McCrum’s store of unexpected detail makes clear Wodehouse’s determination to be a writer. He was a faithful recorder of encounters with strangers and overheard conversations. From 1901: ‘Bus ...”

“... in a dingy flat in Bayswater, where over the years Yeats and Graham Greene, W.H. Davies, T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley were among those who came for tea and buns under a single, unshaded electric light bulb. It also added lustre to some of her put-downs. Dealing with a Boston psychiatrist who demanded to know why she wrote about Christ rather than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the first translations of Cavafy’s work into English and made it known to such figures as T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Here is Forster’s description of Cavafy: a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. His arms are extended, possibly . . . Yes, it is Mr Cavafy, and he is going either from his ...”