“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... After all, the generation before his – Proust, Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Shaw and T.S. Eliot – despised democracy. Nor was Catholicism the mark of a deviant at a time when Belloc urged with some success that it was fashionable to convert to Rome. What made Waugh a deviant was not that he became a Catholic but that he became an Augustinian ...”

“... across as a spokesman for male self-pity who hasn’t finished digesting Thomas Wolfe and T.S. Eliot and – judging by the appearance of ‘ceaselessly’ here – F. Scott Fitzgerald:This was the thing that drew men and women together: not the meeting of minds nor of spirits, not the conjunction of bodies in the dark insanity of copulation – none of ...”

“... that he took to be Mercury asleep (it is actually Endymion) and which he thought of as ‘the sure test of our imaginative faculty’. ‘Bend over it,’ he instructed a correspondent in hushed wonder. ‘Look at those delicate eyelids; that mouth a little open. He is dreaming. Dream on, marble shepherd; few will disturb your slumber.’ The Valley Thick with ...”

“... Euro trash in New York. Helicopter tours. Limos with telephones. Venezuelan oil. There wasn’t so much difference between the Notting Hill hustler and the free-market businessman. The problem was still money. ‘Credit cards, life insurance, and many other trappings of an upwardly-mobile prick.’ Marks was into St Katherine’s Dock years before David ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be in different ways able, and many of them had known and worked with Shakespeare. But their task was not easy. The dating and grouping of Shakespeare’s work is even now not perfectly clear or a matter of agreement: there may well be surprises and revisions still ahead of us, even though we feel that we have at least advanced beyond Dryden’s ...”