“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his glass as he offered opinions about Sergei Diaghilev and the Maharishi, with stop-offs at T.S. Eliot, Judy Garland and the queen mother. I had no time to roll my eyes because I was busy concentrating and trying not to laugh. I wanted to know if any empathy could be detected through the thicket of names. ‘A wonderful, dainty, very loving little ...”

“... I Am Sovereign is highly lucid, almost a roman à thèse. The epigraph, taken from T.S. Eliot, is ‘Where is the life we have lost in living?’ and by the end of the first paragraph Charles is seized by an urge to buy an audiobook called ‘something like: Living Your Unlived Life’. But the novel also contains plenty of digressions and bizarre ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for this is that Gascoigne did not produce the blinding line or the sumptuous phrase for T.S. Eliot to home in on. No ‘bracelets of bright hair about the bone’ here. Indeed, his one poem in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse contains the exquisitely execrable lines ‘And popt a question for the nonce,/To beate my braynes about’. He ...”

“... it was opened, many bodies were found still to be well housed. Most of the coffins had stood the test of time; they were stoutly made: an inner wood coffin was enclosed in a lead-lined outer one and the whole wrapped in studded leather. The contents of those which had mouldered and were in danger of spilling were examined by archaeologists from Oxford. All ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... further garbled as they spread across the world. Lang began to sense that Müller was, like George Eliot’s Casaubon, trapped in a futile search for a key to all mythologies. But he couldn’t say so openly, and so decided to leave Oxford, giving as the reason his impending marriage.He moved to Kensington, where he became a journalist and began his lifelong ...”

“... At the end of June 1915, T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, both 27 years old, were married in a London register office. They had been introduced less than three months earlier by mutual friends in Oxford, where Eliot had been spending the year reading in the Bodleian and working on his Harvard doctoral dissertation in philosophy ...”

“... assassination in Victorian fiction: he had a gift for loathing his characters as great as George Eliot’s for finding the good in hers. And these different Merediths can appear disconcertingly cheek by jowl: it is as though Wordsworth were to take a break from the sublimities of ‘Tintern Abbey’ to write a few sardonic pages in the manner of Vanity ...”

“... was surely the Dantesque aspects of ‘Strange Meeting’ that drew a belated compliment from T.S. Eliot, who in 1964 described it as ‘not only one of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by the war of 1914-18, but also a technical achievement of great originality’.As​ in early Eliot, an entire tradition of ...”

“... remember for the rest of your life, would you not prefer to dine with, say, Carlyle, or George Eliot, or Dickens, or Ruskin, or Tennyson, or even Gladstone? There might be torrential monologues, harsh tirades, uncomfortable silences, but at least you would have experienced a force of nature, you would have trod the slopes of the volcano. Bagehot, by ...”