“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... too. Clive Bell praised the absence of naturalism and the emptying out of the characters; T.S. Eliot argued that on stage Massine embodied all that was ‘most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract’. No longer clogged by Romanticism, soaring or sinking into emotion, it was possible to tell the dancer from the dance. Keynes met Lopokova when she was on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... came out three years after his first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, among others. Vuong considered himself to be reworking the traditional novel in a poetic vein (in interviews he overestimates the novelty of this attempt, and tends to speak as though modernism didn’t happen). What this actually means, since the ...”

“... his mind might be said to have been capable of auto-hallucinogenesis). The result is what T.S. Eliot described as a ‘prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable book’. In our sober and unpoetic age one might feel a twinge of nostalgia for a period in which it was possible to write sentences like these: Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and ...”

“... from some of his teachers, one of whom told him that the thing to do before parties is to ‘toss yourself off in the taxi to make your eyes shine.’ The same man also advised him to ‘step up production to, ideally, a picture a day’. His early paintings, Feaver writes, are ‘naive in that they appear untouched by, indeed oblivious to, academic ...”