“... makes crime noble’ – when I was interrupted by a criticism flung at me from behind by T.S. Eliot. ‘What does that mean? How can crime be noble?’ He had, I noticed, grown a moustache. Each of the above is a complete dream. Others, of course, are much longer, and the more they contain the more they require precisely the same narrative management ...”

“... looks cool, quizzical and rather formidable. Again, snapped by Leonard in September 1932 with T.S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne, whom he was about to leave, she stands calmly beside Tom. Vivienne, seemingly excluded by the successful pair, stands at a distance, hands clasped behind her back, feet together, dressed entirely in white. She was ‘wild as ...”

“... realised she wasn’t as rich as her siblings) in a geometric green jacket and funny hat, and T.S. Eliot, brooding with hooded eyes, set against an abstract background. This proved too much for the Royal Academy, which rejected the portrait for its Summer Exhibition (much to Lewis’s pretend outrage). He painted the Scottish novelist Naomi Mitchison looking ...”

“... Tennyson was not a poet for whom T.S. Eliot professed much love, though he was judicious as well as cool in his appraisals: ‘He has three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety and complete competence.’ (He means ‘they must be like Dante.’) And ‘he had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton’ – an opinion that loses warmth when one recalls what Eliot said elsewhere about Milton ...”

“... How they keep trying to bury Hazlitt, and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs ...”

“... but given it senses wholly different from that attributed to it by its inventor, T.S. Eliot, though that was in turn wholly different from what Remy de Gourmont thought he meant by it. The Times obituary of Sonia Delaunay, who died on 5 December, says that she evolved with her husband a doctrine which Apollinaire, the great advertising copywriter ...”

“... Goldie’s engrossing study of a similar dispute – an early Twenties stand-off between T.S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry? This argument also centred on two magazines – indeed, three magazines – and it began gradually, with neither of the two protagonists quite noticing that it was in the wind. From 1919 to 1921, ...”

“... as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that to despatch my unconditional acceptance (this ...”

“... Larkin’s, and Blunden’s poetry lacks it absolutely. Any good poet can write poems to order – Eliot or Frost or Larkin with equal facility –but Blunden’s poetry, like that of many of its 18th-century models, seems written as if to order all the time. There is no inner tension, no feeling incommunicable in any other way, as there is in ...”

“... with any luck, change the nature of being.Stevens was a little older than Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and died before they did; but his poems consistently read as if they were written a generation later. There must be many rather complicated reasons for this, including many reasons I don’t know. But two reasons are clear and very interesting. They emerge ...”

“... In 1931 we had Stepping heavenward, fairly described by Charles Doyle as ‘a biting lampoon of Eliot ... transformed into Jeremy Pratt Sybba (later Cibber)’. Not the least interest of the present biography is the light it throws on the complicated relationships between the two poets. The first volume of Eliot’s ...”

“... The study is rich in literary chit-chat (first-class chit-chat, to be sure) about, say, T.S. Eliot proposing a toast to someone or other at the Trocadero, but there is no investigation of The Waste Land. (It’s true that Taylor’s title suggests that the book is confined to prose, but its subtitle suggests otherwise.) This is a case of geographical as ...”

“... decades is impressive. Man Ray photographed her, Jean Cocteau sketched her, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot praised her work, Aleister Crowley exploited it. In the Twenties Harold Acton came across her in Paris, not exactly among ‘the bevies of truculent women’ who surrounded Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford but somewhere near. On the fringe of the Montparnasse ...”

“... from Richards, in my final year, I was listening to the James Smith group, who favoured T.S. Eliot and Original Sin. After each of his supervisions, as I remember, though I had enjoyed and learned from them enormously, I would goad the enemy by reporting some theologically absurd remark, typical of an expert on Scientism. Within a year, I was defending ...”

“... does not solve all difficulties. Victoria Glendinning has set herself the sufficiently difficult task of giving a full-scale portrait of an extraordinary woman, whose life was without the incidents of most women’s history – husbands or lovers or children; a lonely life, yet because she acquired immense celebrity which she deliberately exploited, a life ...”