“... 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 ...”

“... typist. In March I started work at Faber, as the advertising manager’s secretary. Faber was T.S. Eliot’s firm: my father was very impressed. I shared an office with two other secretaries, one of them Eliot’s. She was called Angela, not Valerie: Valerie had married Eliot four years ...”

“... Turgeniev, Turgenef, Turgeneff, Toogueneff (this last when he was visiting Scotland).T.S. Eliot wrote in the Egoist that Turgenev ‘was a perfect example of the benefits of transplantation … A position which for a smaller man may be merely a compromise, or a means of disappearance, was for Turgenev … a source of authority.’ As Orlando Figes ...”

“... Meanwhile, in conditions where the ground might open under the present, a newer approach which Eliot had dubbed ‘the mythical method’ had become available. This was the art of holding a classical safety-net under the tottering data of the contemporary, of paralleling, shadowing, archetypifying – the art practised in Ulysses and The Waste Land and the ...”

“... men and long-canonised monsters of fame (Wordsworth and Hölderlin, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Eliot and Miłosz); and it engages with them in a humanistic manner that is essentially unmarked by developments in literary theory and criticism after structuralism. Its interpretations depend on a range of interlocking philosophical views (about ...”

“... The Whirling Eye (1920) by Thomas W. Benson and Charles S. Wolfe    A psychiatrist, visiting an insane asylum, discovers his old friend Professor Mehlman, who declares that he has been unjustly incarcerated merely because he is in love with a Venusian. Mehlman had constructed a giant telescope in the Andes to observe life on Venus. In the course of his studies, he had become smitten by the sight of a beautiful Venusian female, whom he kept watching ...”

“... indefatigable contributors to the Supplement, Marghanita Laski, who commented in a letter to the TLS in 1972: ‘As every dictionary-reader knows, two people can read the same book and record almost non-identical lists of words to be found in it. One reader can read a book twice and come up with a different lists of words each time. In addition, and little ...”

“... surprise that Johnson, the hack made great, scorned Gray’s unwillingness to look on poetry as a task. We can be more sympathetic, but it is striking that Gray wrote so little and left much incomplete. The surprising thing about the Elegy is that Gray actually finished it. Even he was surprised. When he sent a copy to Horace Walpole he told his friend to ...”