“... 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’.A s​ 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 ...”

“... to do just what he thought novelists shouldn’t, ‘point a moral and adorn a tale’.T.S. Eliot considered Lawrence a genius but counted among his failings ‘an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking’. The remark infuriated F.R. Leavis, but Lawrence himself would not have been especially wounded: what a Harvard man would ‘ordinarily call ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we’re going to the dogs. But the staged apocalypse feels serendipitous, chancy, thrilling.Hardy, Eliot and Yeats loomed large in Auden’s pantheon, but he wasn’t about to be co-opted into anyone else’s story of tradition and the individual talent. He had a penchant for anagrams, and was pleased to know himself as someone who might ‘hug a wet shady ...”

“... intimacy with his readers in Wilson’s articles from these years. Halfway through a piece on T.S. Eliot’s For Lancelot Andrewes, for example, he can break in on his own prose and say, ‘I was writing last week on John Dos Passos,’ and then go on to make a comparison between the two authors’ respective forms of revulsion from industrial ...”

“... has never been very hospitable. ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,/Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain!’ Blake cries with all his effortless superiority. I find it slightly weird to see each year how warmly and spontaneously students endorse Blake’s attack on the spiritual blight of materialism and rationalism and experimental science, even as ...”

“... to the streets of London, this time walking with their flares in front of motor cars. As T.S. Eliot evoked ‘the brown fog of a winter dawn’ in The Waste Land, a Committee for the Investigation of Atmospheric Pollution insisted that two-thirds of the problem came from domestic fireplaces.New instruments recorded 340,000 pieces of soot in every cubic ...”

“... read’. It took the genre into what the paranoid CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton, citing T.S. Eliot, called ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, and topped bestseller lists in Britain and America. Cornwell described his sudden success as ‘like being in a car crash’. He resigned from MI6 in 1964. Once again, the exact sequence of events is unclear, but he ...”

“... of starting with the personal, topical and perhaps autobiographical, then working towards a T.S. Eliot-like ‘impersonality’ through repeated rewriting and editing. Coetzee was drawn to ‘impersonality’, Attwell remarks, ‘because it suited his personality’ – a curious formulation. But ‘impersonality is not what it seems. It is not a simple ...”

“... the Olivier stage seemed an ideal space for verse drama: not the sort associated with T.S. Eliot, ‘so discreet and well bred in its metrical gentility you wondered why it bothered to go public at all,’ but something more akin to music hall or panto, with ‘a vernacular energy to crackle across the footlights and engage an audience’. Ibsen ...”

“... be,’ Thomas Hardy wrote, ‘it exacts a full look at the worst,’ and there’s an echo of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in what happens to Phemy: the President of the Immortals has his sport with her. At times Coppard’s worst is even bleaker than Hardy’s. Hence the complaint of one reviewer when ‘The Hurly Burly’ appeared in Coppard’s second ...”

“... Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later it emerged that all that most pupils will face is a test based on extracts of verse and prose in a 45-page anthology which has just been published. Meanwhile Mr Patten, who has no powers to control university entrance, has urged vice-chancellors to stop admitting students whose spelling and grammar are not up to ...”

“... ladylike black stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs’. Hawthorne, T.S. Eliot said, had ‘the firmness, the true coldness, the hard coldness of the genuine artist’. Eliot’s observation applies equally well to Hawthorne’s admirer, Eudora Welty, although others who have noted this similarity ...”