“... of ‘individuality’. ‘The poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past,’ T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, published in the Egoist in 1919. ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ There’s no direct evidence that Parry read the essay – even if ...”

“... and Co opened in 1919. In the window were editions of Shakespeare (of course), Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and copies of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (Monnier’s favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and ...”

“... prioritise the needs of fiction over what might seem more normal sorts of human obligation: T.S. Eliot strikingly said of James’s criticism that it ‘preyed not upon ideas, but upon living beings’. At the same time, Tóibín’s affection for James is palpable: his haplessness and social awkwardness are treated indulgently, he is frequently seen to be a ...”

“... the best text. Not without errors and awkwardness, Noble and Hogg have performed the helpful task of fitting line-by-line glosses beside the poems (even the word ‘wee’ is explained), but they are not consistent about such things as sources for texts or quotations, or about differentiating Burns’s notes from their own. They have spliced an academic ...”

“... known were their unfriendly depictions of Levantine Greeks and, in particular, Jews. Unlike T.S. Eliot, however, Georges Remi, aka Hergé, was very certain of his nationality. He was, according to Pierre Assouline, ‘the personification of Belgium’, and it’s true that he created, in Tintin, one of the few national emblems his squabbling country can ...”

“... private income and some reviewing. He was not short of friends, including some as grand as T.S. Eliot, who admired Empson as well as finding him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming on; myopia left him unfit for military service, and so, almost inevitably, he found himself in mid-1940 ...”

“... of subjects: verse techniques, the difficulty of finding servants, staying with Max Beerbohm, the Test series, his first meeting with Thomas Hardy, the shortcomings of his wife/son/daughter-in-law, his neglect by the critics – this last a recurring theme. ‘They don’t understand what a talent I have for light verse.’ He had no pudeur about expressing ...”

“... in commonplace pleasures – though without sanctimony. ‘The trivial round, the common task,’ Belinda repeats from Keble’s hymn ‘New Every Morning Is the Love’, ‘did it furnish quite all we needed to ask?’Pym’s fiction is decidedly parochial. The Anglican parish is usually the social setting, though trips to Mowbray’s bookshop for ...”

“... which has it that no ending is possible because there has not yet been a beginning. T.S. Eliot wrapped a religious message around the proposition, ‘In my beginning is my end.’ In Endgame, Hamm half-quotes Eliot (‘the end is in the beginning’), but then adds derisively: ‘and yet you go on.’ Continuation ...”

“... and Fascist readings have tugged at it repeatedly. Both Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and George Eliot’s Felix Holt have processed it for their own purposes. The play seems always to have functioned as a kind of arena. However, Patterson’s concern to establish what the ‘text of Coriolanus itself’ has to say presumes to stand aside from all this in an ...”

“... of entertainment art: American crime fiction. Larkin enjoyed crime novels (as did, of course, T.S. Eliot). As a reviewer and essayist, he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first ...”

“... This is the irresponsibility that James would demand in 1885 when he complained that George Eliot knew her characters too well, hemmed them in with her knowing essayism. He wanted characters that were ‘seen, in the plastic irresponsible way’ – meaning probably Shakespeare, whose people, as Coleridge put it, ‘like those in real life, are to be ...”

“... predictably widened in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of ...”

“... now mutates. We find Marlowe conversing, albeit in a master-servant way, about T.S. Eliot with a black college graduate. By the time we get to The Long Good-Bye, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department has acquired a Hispanic captain whom Marlowe feels able to call ‘a cool, competent, dangerous guy’. Marlowe explicitly questions (to ...”

“... The Criterion, T.S. Eliot’s periodical, ran from shortly after the First World War to the very eve of World War Two. Or, if one prefers, from one of Eliot’s major bouts of depression to another. The two time-schemes are, in fact, related. In 1921, the business negotiations to finance the proposed journal had to be suspended when Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown; it was during his convalescence from this illness that he wrote The Waste Land ...”