“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... occur on the edges of, at a tangent to, the official liturgies. At times, reading Burnside, Eliot rises to mind; echoes of ‘Burnt Norton’ and ‘Marina’ are transposed into ‘Urban Myths’. But it is one sign of Burnside’s distinctiveness that he cannot be subsumed as Eliotic. Indeed, his work is free of the prosy ponderousness and the ...”

“... of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the unrealised walk in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked at one road, then took ‘the other, as just as fair/And having perhaps the better ...”

“... of massified and conscripted culture and society. I think Wreszin is too uncritical of T.S. Eliot’s 1956 letter claiming that Macdonald’s ‘form of radicalism’ had most in common with Eliot’s ‘own form of conservatism’. Macdonald’s attacks, written for the New Yorker, on the vulgarisation of Webster’s ...”

“... Society’s petty rules do not apply to them, Sibella tells her lover before their coupling: ‘’tis our hearts alone that can bind the vow.’ Out of such interesting but inconclusive detail, Grundy tries to convince us that Secresy is a great book. Fenwick’s ‘artful’ handling of the epistolary form is reminiscent of Richardson, she suggests; the ...”

“... modest in all except their cultural ambitions, readers of, say, the New Statesman and George Eliot, who craved philosophy. Furthermore the media were willing to recognise their existence. In 1951 Stuart Hampshire produced a small book on Spinoza. Spinoza was, through his associations with 19th-century dissent, the philosopher designed to appeal to this ...”

“... drawn to right-wing totalitarianism and then became disillusioned with it – W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, for example – took refuge in an artistic flight from reality. Stuart’s work, after the war, became more real. He moved towards, not away from, the terrain of his shame. Other commentators, including Conor Cruise O’Brien, took the opposite view. I ...”

“... them? He thought it over, and made his offer. ‘Nothing.’ Hmm. Nothing? Well, what about T.S. Eliot’s death-socks, equally authenticated? ‘Nothing.’ So my own socks, were I to die in them tomorrow, would be worth less than nothing? ‘No, just nothing.’ Gekoski once sold Tolkien’s Oxford gown for about £500, but literary relics have to strike a ...”