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“... the school I went to from 1946 until 1952, as a grammar school though I suppose it was. It wasn’t so self-conscious and pleased with itself as most of the schools that feature and the range of ability for which it catered seems in retrospect so wide it might well have been a comprehensive school before its time. Nor was it in the least bit snobbish as so ...”

“... event the ‘shudder’ turned out to have little to do with Shakespeare and much to do with T.S. Eliot, and also with Frank. When we printed the piece in the paper, Don Coles, a Canadian poet, wrote in to say that he thought ‘the four pages of this essay the finest I have read in the LRB, this issue or any other’. Before publishing the letter we sent it ...”

“... a London publishing house was very often just that – a business run from a house. When T.S. Eliot was with them, Faber and Faber were on the corner of Russell Square opposite the SOAS extension (it is marked by a blue plaque; SOAS now occupies that building too). Thinking back to what such offices were like, you realise that an 18th-century division of ...”

“... biography is itself a notable contribution to ‘The Literature of Fascism’ which T.S. Eliot was judging with that sentence in 1928. In 1928 Oswald Mosley was still an up-and-coming Labour MP. It was the year after Eliot had made manifest that the something which satisfied his own craving to believe was ...”

“... and Roy Campbell as potential allies, Geoffrey Grigson lurking threateningly in the wings and T.S. Eliot a very distant god. The former Muriel Camberg joined this cast in 1944 after a stint in southern Africa, where she’d ended a short marriage to the unstable if catchily named Sydney Spark. She was armed with an education from James Gillespie’s School for ...”

“... cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone who counted and being able to defend at least two sides of every major public issue of his time – always favoured him. The list of his friends, his associates, the ...”

“... properly, a matrilineal society), preceding the rule of Zeus and the Olympians. T.S. Eliot drew on her sense of the rituals underlying Greek drama, incorporating it into his own plays, where he integrated the modern primitive (desert islands and sex murders) into Sweeney Agonistes. In The Family Reunion he transformed the Erinyes from fearful ...”

“... fellows spent their lives. This feeling was most fully and influentially articulated by T.S. Eliot, when he argued, in ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923), that the novel had in effect ‘ended’ with Flaubert and James: the very formlessness which had once made it the adequate ‘expression’ of a previous age, an age not yet formless enough to ...”

“... which include ‘Glasses’, ‘Hats’ and ‘Suits’, the latter bringing Gay Talese and T.S. Eliot into unlikely proximity. There are also pull quotes with such fun facts as that Jacqueline Susann’s ambition as a schoolgirl ‘was to own a mink coat’, and in the early 1970s Samuel Beckett used a ‘now classic leather Gucci hobo holdall as his ...”

“... Ezra Pound (who called Dante ‘a knower of dreams rather than a mixer among men’) and T.S. Eliot discovered Dante, and, through him, the earlier Tuscan and Sicilian love poets. ‘A ciascun’alma presa’ was translated by Frank Bidart in 1997 with an immediacy that captures Dante’s summons to follow him along Love’s path:To all those driven ...”

“... of their awareness of others ... for the novelist this is at the highest level the most crucial test.’ That her own fiction fails this test, indeed that it commits many of the sins she has proscribed, is not lost on her. The struggle between breviary and right conduct, the wrestle to turn a plan into a real city, is one ...”

“... harm in that, unless you announce there is harm in that), as when he suggests that T.S. Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ really shows ‘that social and intellectual issues have gotten confused in a characteristic English way.’Annulling even the possibility of a principled alternative to theory – namely, principles – Hartman slides ...”

“... to emulate the supreme Swiftian manner, does nevertheless command the steely style which T.S. Eliot praised. Deploring the symptoms of decay in the wording of the preface to the Revised Prayer Book, Eliot concluded: ‘And there was once a Dean (of St Patrick’s) who formed the purest, the most supple, the most useful ...”

“... to denigrate ‘the greatest imaginative novelist’ of his generation. A bored highbrow, T.S. Eliot, at once protested that he didn’t know what was meant by ‘greatest’, ‘imaginative’ or ‘novelist’. Twenty years later, F.R. Leavis was still having to contend with Eliot’s insistence that Lawrence had been ...”

“... that he was one of the handful of highbrows. He is careful to record not only a joke made by T.S. Eliot in allusion to a maxim by La Rochefoucauld but also the fact that he, Hinks, shared it, whereas an ‘egregious’ American professor failed to see the point. In Rome he sits near Jean-Paul Sartre at dinner and we are made to feel that the Frenchman was ...”