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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or (less often outside the Marxist tradition) ‘capitalism’. Figures such as Tawney, T.S. Eliot, and the Idealist philosopher and master of Balliol College A.D. Lindsay came together in the late 1930s to endow this discourse with its distinctively high moral, at times Anglican, tone, yet these traditions of indigenous social criticism were to be given ...”

“... either ‘branch men’ or ‘head office’. This came from a story Seamus was telling about T.S. Eliot. Lloyds Bank decided to throw a party a few years ago for Mrs Eliot, and Seamus went as the representative poet. Some knight or other was giving a speech and he said that Eliot wasn’t ...”

“... somewhat sourly. Auden was only 22 when his play Paid on Both Sides was published by T.S. Eliot in the Criterion, and he became a Faber poet later that year with a celebrated debut volume austerely entitled Poems. Within eight years, now the recipient of the King’s Medal for Poetry, he had a special double number of New Verse devoted to ...”

“... Mill, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky; Austen, Dickens, Conrad and James; Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mann; Freud and the newly translated Kafka. The books might feed a sense of alienation which was rescued by arrogance. Living in an exuberant, crudely philistine business culture, they managed to create, for the first time since ...”

“... much style – being, in fact, a little careless, or rather seeming to be, here and there’. T.S. Eliot felt that Hardy was indifferent to ‘the prescripts of good writing’ and composed ‘always very carelessly’. ‘At times,’ Eliot added, ‘his style touches sublimity without ever having passed through the stage ...”

“... simultaneously practised medicine and written books, and of others who have been clergymen. T.S. Eliot was a publisher, and as everyone knows Wallace Stevens and Franz Kafka worked for large insurance organisations. To my knowledge, only two writers of importance have been managers of a paint factory: you in Turin, Italy and Sherwood Anderson in ...”

“... The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Tanner takes evident delight in the task at hand and exploits it with an often brilliant mischievousness. This allows him to show that readers of James will be abundantly rewarded once they forgo much of what they already have, including the conventional expectation that the reason to read great ...”

“... give them a little Christian twist or kink, much as, say, Aquinas did with Aristotle, or as T.S. Eliot does in his plays. In Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix, playing Cash, is clearly on a mythic journey: there is first the early trauma, the violent death of Cash’s older brother; then there’s Cash out on the open road, the young virile male full of ...”

“... in 1944 when the Soviet Union was Britain’s ally, and which many publishers, including T.S. Eliot at Faber, refused to publish. Eliot’s rejection of it was blunt: ‘The positive point of view, which I take to be Trotskyist, is not convincing.’ But the overwhelmingly negative force of Orwell’s political position ...”

“... all, adultery that was on the cards here: ‘Oh, a crime will do/As well, I reply, to serve for a test,//As a virtue golden through and through,/Sufficient to vindicate itself/And prove its worth at a moment’s view.’ That sounds like a practically existentialist lesson, though with a note of reassuring humour. There is a good deal of talk of God in ...”

“... 1938, Allen Tate proclaimed his style ‘the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot’. Old Possum himself sent words of admiration: ‘I want to see more poetry from you.’Schwartz was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants. His father, Harry, made a fortune in real estate. Schwartz remembered him dressed in a ...”

“... reality will require them both to engage in new and complex analysis and to undertake the awesome task of inventing a fresh vocabulary of clichés and banalities. I am aware from personal experience that, prompted by a conditioned reflex, Western diplomats have long responded to any new foreign policy proposal by first asking: ‘How much will such a move ...”

“... in response to one of Jolas’s portentous questionnaires, the equally ‘Euramerican’ T.S. Eliot, editor of transition’s English anti-type, the Criterion, noted: ‘I am not, as a matter of fact, particularly interested in my “night-mind”. This is not a general assertion about night-minds, nor does it carry any suggestion about other people’s ...”