“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a bit rich coming from Thomas.Roberts published two collections with Faber under T.S. Eliot’s editorship: Poems in 1944 and Gods with Stainless Ears in 1951, though the latter was written first. She recalled visiting Eliot at the Faber offices in 1948 with her two small children, Angharad and Prydein, who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... consensus, the reputation of Isaiah Berlin stands like a lion in your path. But the task of confronting said lion is not at all easy or simple: by no means as much as the preceding paragraphs may have made it appear. True, he was simultaneously pompous and dishonest in the face of a long moral crisis where his views and his connections could ...”

“... Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him. Yet they scarcely figure in his poetry, while his criticism, obsessed with issues of inheritance, usually suggests that ...”

“... sung at religious ceremonies and songs at feasts or private symposia. Forget about reading T.S. Eliot to yourself in bed. Our subject is the words and music you hear at social gatherings, large and small. Think pubs and cafés, karaoke, football matches, the last night of the Proms. Think Morning Service at the village church, carols from King’s College ...”

“... to his word. So, as a budding critic in 1924: ‘Holden-Dawes lent me a poem called Waste Land by Eliot, advising me to read it. There were some rather beautiful lines but the rest was incomprehensible. If I want music in verse I’ll stick to Verlaine, thank you very much.’ Buying paintings in Paris in 1926: ‘I’m afraid abstraction leaves me cold ...”