“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Verse starved of parental love may well have problems attracting affection later. T.S. Eliot took a charitable interest in the case in 1921, but his contribution is rather reminiscent of Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre enjoining the Lowood girls to be glad of their burned breakfast: ‘We cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... quaint metaphysics and homespun philosophising guaranteed his implacable exclusion from it. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated comment on Henry James – ‘a mind so fine that no idea can violate it’ – sounds like a crafty backhanded compliment but in fact represents, from the virulently anti-intellectualist Eliot, the ...”

“... special relief in so unfurrowed a writer from ‘the underworld of letters’. The phrase is T.S. Eliot’s. His breach between the underworld of letters and ‘serious writers’, even though he judged the former (like the music hall as against ‘serious’ theatre) to be the more healthy in many ways, is one which Highsmith’s art both concedes and does ...”

“... of his politics; there was almost no theoretical fuel. (In this, he was the opposite of T.S. Eliot, say.) He was not anti-semitic, despite the odd Jewish caricature in his fiction, and angrily implored the Norwegian Attorney-General, in 1946, to ‘search through my collected works to see if he can find any attack on Jews’. His senseless hatred of ...”

“... specialising in sacred cows. There was blood everywhere (‘Do you know who I hate? I hate T.S. Eliot. That’s who I hate’), and no literary reputation emerged unscathed (‘all those cheerless craps between 1900 and 1930 – Ginny Woolf and Dai Lawrence and Morgy Forster’). It is perhaps not surprising that the publication of their letters did not ...”

“... the philosophical idealism still current at Merton (the college where, a few years earlier, T.S. Eliot had written his thesis on F.H. Bradley). ‘Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings,’ he concluded. ‘Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time die/For we, being ghosts, cannot catch hold of things.’ MacNeice’s early poetry plays defensive ...”