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“... 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 ...”

“... Greek in this sense either, but Auden’s point remains, a post-Holocaust secularisation of T.S. Eliot’s thoughts about time. ‘Only through time time is conquered,’ Eliot wrote, and for Auden human time, which he elsewhere calls ‘a City/where each inhabitant has/a political duty/nobody else can perform’, is the ...”

“... looked for abstraction in works of art, emphasising openness to interpretation. The young T.S. Eliot called Hamlet ‘almost certainly an artistic failure’ on these grounds. And during the last sixty or seventy years, many literary academics, asked which was Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, would have answered King Lear. Modernism played its part in the ...”

“... of any talent I may have springs) but, apart from these, something else I cannot define.To T.S. Eliot he wrote:He had an intense love for me and it adds anew to my grief and remorse that I did not go to Dublin to see him for so many years. I kept him constantly under the illusion that I would come and was always in correspondence with him but an instinct I ...”

“... own country another way’ (Matthew 2.12). They may have had a ‘cold coming of it’, as T.S. Eliot and Lancelot Andrewes thought, but they seem to be entirely benevolent figures. Yet here they are again, Yeats’s poem suggests, ‘unsatisfied’, eager for ‘turbulence’. Perhaps they have always been here, ‘now as at all times’, waiting for the ...”

“... baron smoking a cigarette.’ But still, there are questions that linger. If on page 135 George Eliot has married, the previous week, a young man 25 years her junior, we must be in 1880: but then how, in that case, could young Maudie Nettleship, back on page 74, have had read to her ‘Lord Tennyson’s poem’ about Ulysses? He was no lord until 1884. Some ...”

“... early admirer Herbert Grierson. The Edinburgh professor’s work had recently prompted Eliot’s celebration of poetry censured by Dr Johnson for having ‘the most heterogeneous ideas ... yoked by violence together’. MacDiarmid’s determination to be ‘whaur extremes meet’ is very much a Modernist priority as well as a Scottish one. This is ...”

“... that either the arguments should have been digested or they shouldn’t have been broached. The TLS furore or fury about Peter Reading’s poem ‘Cub’ – anti-semitic, or dramatising anti-semitism? – isn’t appropriately or commensurately to be engaged with in two pages of musings (under the aegis ‘Or Only Funny and Sad?’), ending with: ‘Tone ...”

“... persistence. By the 20th century, any whiff of pretentiousness had long since vanished. T.S. Eliot’s respect for Jonson’s constructive skills almost succeeds in presenting his drama as all works and no play. Despite the claims made for his expertise in manipulating plot, what holds Jonson’s best material together, according to ...”