“... 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 ...”

“... by asking her if she’d read it. Sontag had, many times, and the reward for passing this test of a pick-up line was an introduction to San Francisco’s gay scene. Nightwood showed Sontag ‘the way I want to write – rich and rhythmic – heavy, sonorous prose’, but also how to live, as she and her new friends laughed about ‘what a parody of ...”

“... as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any book by any poet in the past couple of years. The praise is disturbing, sometimes wrongheaded, and reflects a category mistake; it also makes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it in his counterweight, Adorno for Revolutionaries (2011), Adorno as ‘a kind of German T.S. Eliot without the practical cats’.Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ But he was no misanthrope. A melancholic, certainly, but also a ...”

“... cook, parlourmaid and governess, but Isabel made sure her boys were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky ...”

“... have as much to do with Somerset Maugham (whom they must have helped to invent) as with T.S. Eliot. But there is a curious quality in these early stories which throws some light on the writer’s originality during the 1890s. I want to illustrate this quality, somewhat Irishly, from another and litter collection, because one story there reveals it ...”

“... the forbidding notice ‘No through road to action’, and he contested the idea, implicit in Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’, that to embrace Donne you had to give up Milton. It was a stage in which, not for the last time, Kermode offered himself as a reconciler and peacemaker. Romantic Image, moreover, in the way it pursued a certain ...”

“... what in vulgar language is nonprofessional or simply human. More than sixty years ago T.S. Eliot uttered his classic dictum barring amateurs: ‘we must consider poetry primarily as poetry and not another thing.’ When in the Sixties and Seventies Barthes, Derrida and others declared the poem to be an autonomous system of verbal signs, they were ...”

“... transfiguration of it. Quite unwittingly Adrian is offering a sophisticated analogue of what T.S. Eliot had to say about Ulysses: that the novel as a form could no longer model its order on a world which had lost all sense of order. No wonder Mann was so taken by the connection. But where Joyce, according to Eliot, answered ...”

“... Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs of Bob Dylan (he first wrote about them in the Listener in June 1972, a decade after Dylan released his ...”

“... in Lawrence that Nottinghamshire negative, ‘Nay’, appears), repeating, joking. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot said, was humourless. Actually, the appeal of his voice lies partly in its comedy. This is less obvious in the longer novels than in the stories, novellas, travel writing and poems, forms to which Kinkead-Weekes gives full and overdue ...”

“... I don’t know. I come from work, dead tired. The Guardian is taking all out of me – writing tosh. What price salted fish and things of that sort. Actually that is my assignment for tomorrow! It hurts. Now keep your chin up, and far more important: keep yourself out of mischief.   Love from Ma and all, Pa. So in his liberated and intelligent ...”

“... assault on Bentham and a PR job on behalf of Coleridge. For all his later disagreements with T.S. Eliot – in whom the faithful William Walsh sees, disparagingly, a French or American taste compared with Leavis’s native English one – Leavis did not define the great English literary tradition very differently. But ...”

“... apparently vulgar obviousness, which again seems unusually calculated, as if inserted as a dare to test how confident the reader is about his or her response. One short poem from 1930 gives a flavour of the general effect. The poem is called ‘Beyond’, and it is reprinted here in its entirety. Pain is impossible to describe Pain is the impossibility of ...”