“... 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 ...”

“... The release in 2009 of the first two volumes of T.S. Eliot’s letters, and the year before of the final volume of Katherine Mansfield’s, raises questions about the relationship between these two and their spouses, Vivien Haigh-Wood and John Middleton Murry.* Why was Eliot distrustful, and even apprehensive, of Mansfield? What was Murry’s relationship with Vivien – and indeed with Eliot himself? Why were Vivien’s feelings about Murry so tortured – and was Mansfield jealous of her? There can be no doubt that Eliot was deeply suspicious of Mansfield, and there is plenty of evidence that she observed him closely and accurately ...”

“... of it went down in the crash that year. ‘You lose your money in the market,’ Chico said. ‘I toss mine away on dames and gambling. Who had the most fun?’ A conviction that he was among the unlucky would drive Groucho’s comedy for the rest of his days. The Cocoanuts, which opened on Broadway in 1929 and ran for 377 shows, was their real ...”

“... always expect its intellectuals to approach us with the colonial cringe of Henry James or T.S. Eliot. Rorty made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery. And his devotion to the United States as the original ...”

“... even by creatures like Lenehan. This is one of the scars left by the reactionary movement of T.S. Eliot: modern critics cannot realise that an author around 1900 was usually trying to be advanced. Stephen was not a decadent but an Ibsenite: he would consider Madam Bloom an unusually satisfactory specimen of the New Woman. She earns enough money to be ...”

“... he never made a public political statement in his life. This was not how he viewed the writer’s task. Nor was he a reactionary like Goncourt; he described himself correctly as ‘an enraged liberal’. He also liked the idea of societies and civilisations coming to an end, because it meant ‘that something new was being born’. And his fundamental ...”

“... get me started on her rap about how she learned to dance with all the funky ‘spades’.) T.S. Eliot once said of Baudelaire that he was ‘in some ways far in advance of the point of view of his own time, and yet was very much of it, very largely partook of its limited merits, faults and fashions’. Virginia Woolf said of another great street ...”

“... to the best possible advantage, to cover up her weaknesses – or turn them into assets – and to toss campstools under her whenever she wobbles. This in itself is a pleasure to watch; so is the way she rewards them; still more, I enjoyed watching something that obviously involved relaxed, improvising fun for those who worked on it. It is the best imaginable ...”

“... of hatred a version of the Homeric anonymity and antiquity that the great impersonalist T.S. Eliot got from his Harvard education. As Yeats puts it in the ‘General Introduction’, ‘I commit my emotion to shepherds, herdsmen, camel-drivers, learned men, Milton’s or Shelley’s Platonist, that tower Palmer drew. Talk to me of originality and I will ...”

“... of lectures on Milton and Wordsworth, which began by addressing the attacks on Milton that T.S. Eliot and his acolytes were mounting. The revival of interest in metaphysical poetry, which Grierson had done so much to stimulate, had prompted critics to discuss the connection between form and content in poetry: ‘The favourite phrase is “unified ...”

“... an informal seminar in which to evaluate literature and vent their grievances, deploring T.S. Eliot as a simpering turncoat and accusing the ‘metropolitan weeklies’ of conspiring to keep Leavis’s reputation on the down-low. Although the Leavis approach to literature, politics and criticism is temperamentally and operatively different from the ...”