“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... first undertook this large-scale biography of Yeats, died in 1983, and after some vicissitudes the task devolved on Roy Foster, the professor of Irish history at Oxford. He has had access to Lyons’s notes and transcripts, invaluable to a successor confronted, as he says, with ‘a vast and unfamiliar subject’. Vast it remains, but the unfamiliarity has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the novel. The genre thrives on irony and play, as Milan Kundera repeatedly remarks, and T.S. Eliot meant to praise Henry James by suggesting he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. We might say the same of dozens of other novelists. Plenty of ideas, but none of them nailed down, all of them implicated in other, conflicting ideas; and there are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... antithetical terms. ‘The Dialect of the Tribe’ (a phrase of Mallarmé’s appropriated by T.S. Eliot in ‘Little Gidding’) takes the form of an academic article in which an unnamed professor discusses a small New Guinea tribe whose peculiar language has no content, but instead somehow enacts the process of translation. Every Pagolak sentence embodies ...”

“... are what Google sells to advertisers.’ Vaidhyanathan, who likes alliteration but isn’t so big on facts, doesn’t explain what he means by ‘sells’ (or whether ‘to sell a fancy’ could mean anything at all), but if he’s implying that Google makes the information it has about us available to advertisers then he’s wrong. It isn’t ...”

“... his own devising. He distinguished himself among the crowd at Nin’s apartment by volunteering to test the anatomical plausibility of the dirty stories they were assembling for an anonymous benefactor. He was an insatiable seducer, and a bold one too: one night after dinner with Kael and her boyfriend, Duncan cornered the boyfriend and flashed his erection ...”

“... 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 ...”