“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the first time are the absurdist letters they wrote together from Columbia Institute to T.S. Eliot and Malcolm de Chazal. The fall-out from Howl was immense, and not entirely benign. For a start, the San Francisco renaissance that had been quietly brewing for several years under the watchful guidance of Rexroth and Duncan suddenly became a New Yorker’s ...”

“... the very start of the play Marcellus remarks of what he and Barnardo have seen: ‘Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy.’ Three explanations of the Ghost are current in Hamlet. There is the suggestion that beholders are imagining it. People are often thought to imagine things in the play, and Hamlet and the Ghost both say that the weak imagine things. But ...”