“... We see it most perfectly at work when James has set himself some well-nigh impossible critical task, like celebrating Flaubert’s immense achievement while wishing it was even greater, or divining the precise mixture of Emerson’s gifts and limitations: ‘He has not a grain of current contempt; one feels, at times, that he has not enough.’ ‘We have ...”

“... web of relations in which they all come to seem indifferently interchangeable. If the book wasn’t so nervous of cultural theory, one might even detect in this method a trace of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s notion of ‘constellations’, a brand of surrealist sociology which abandons hierarchies and abstractions and lets its general ideas emerge ...”

“... has long outstripped its regional resources and reached the Colorado River, far to its east. T.S. Eliot’s Mississippi was a ‘strong brown god’: the Colorado River is more like a ruddy writhing serpent. Or was, since the snake has now been chopped into segments by dams, notably by Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon, and Hoover Dam south of ...”

“... clear, and it issues in a local discrimination which a reader of Pamela and Joseph Andrews can test. But some of the other comparisons seem illuminating when you first meet them and arbitrary a bit later. Why Camus? Why Ionesco rather than any other writer? If an 18th-century writer resembles a 20th-century writer in some respect, is it because sentiments ...”

“... also stimulated Edward FitzGerald’s ‘translation’ of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. (T.S. Eliot’s misgivings about FitzGerald’s poem, although he wasn’t immune to its appeal, are representative of Modernism’s distrust of ‘Orientalia’.) In the second half of the 19th century, the excitement waned, despite the work of Max Müller, the editor ...”

“... he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)’It wasn’t so much the homoeroticism of ‘For James Dean’ that caused the kerfuffle, but the dignitas of an ‘Adonais’ conferred on a teen idol. (O’Hara even structures it as an apostrophe to the gods.) But surely it is only equal to the dignity conferred on ...”

“... of Bertrand. The reference to Dante and his encounter with Virgil may appropriately recall T.S. Eliot’s meeting with the ‘familiar compound ghost’ in ‘Little Gidding’; or more recently, and Irishly, we may think of the admonitions received from the ghost of William Carleton in Station Island (l984) by Seamus Heaney, a translator of Dante: you ...”

“... think of Shelley assuming Mont Blanc to be on his side against Castlereagh (or of T.S. Eliot’s remark that no man would join himself to the universe if he had anything better to join himself to). But, after all, materialism has no monopoly on particularity: few have been more fervent in their idealism than Blake (‘Mental Things are alone ...”

“... divided across two jurisdictions.Murphy seeks a job in the hospital because he wants to test his hypothesis that a life cut off from other people is a truly free life. The ironies are obvious, given that the nurses are described as ‘sadists’, doling out physical beatings at night behind locked doors, and the therapies to which the patients are ...”

“... in a review of Victor Hugo’s L’Année terrible, and this must have been one source of T.S. Eliot’s idea of artistic tradition – and modernist technique – as a ‘simultaneous present’. In ‘On the Cliffs’ (1880), Swinburne experimented with blending quotations from Sappho, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Keats and other unhappy poets of the ...”

“... he described as that of a ‘thoroughgoing classicist reactionary’. He disapproved of T.S. Eliot’s obscurity: ‘the practice of the masters showed,’ he claimed, ‘that the best poems had been written simply and comprehensibly about simple feelings and ideas.’ His first collection, Winter Movement, appeared in 1930 (like Auden’s Poems) and was ...”

“... choice and in its way a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom ...”