“... of a wet English county, Well-greased, but gormless, ancient, but randy. I am like the T.S. Eliot of new wastelands; Fertile but powerless; young but with tied hands And, in a lavishly costumed Wallace Stevens pastiche: Beau Roi of Serpentines in thunderous mish-mash! Golden glissadings, O empty effendi of air, The tutor’s fulgurations, fine ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had returned from England with a set of false teeth, which he claimed to have belonged to T.S. Eliot.’ The better to bite her with, no doubt. A married woman, she then went off to London, which owned a little Dublin of its own as far as hard words were concerned. She had suddenly run away with handsome, forbidding Ernest Gébler, the son of a Czech ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... art. It was for this reason that it was predicted – the remark is sometimes attributed to T.S. Eliot – that he would ‘survive not as an individual, but as the representative of a little world of 1914’.Mark Hussey valiantly attempts to show that Bell’s life and career amount to more than just one good book, but although Bell wrote much more on art ...”

“... invariably banal, and he tends to lard his prose with too many, or too hackneyed, tags from T.S. Eliot or Mallarmé. He has a good ear for speech, but he has only rather shopworn devices when it comes to building up characters. A point of some interest arises here. In A Mine of Serpents, Brooke constructs a lengthy saga round a friend of his elder ...”

“... We can all second William Faulkner: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Or T.S. Eliot: ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past.’ Our lives don’t just play out over time: we lead them over the course of that time, shaping them as an extended whole, remembering and ...”

“... the turn of spirit in, say, Robert Graves and Saint-Jean Perse is radically Homeric, that in T.S. Eliot and Valéry is unmistakably Virgilian. The equations become non-linear, as it were, by virtue of the several presences of Dante. Recalling early childhood, Proust sees himself trailing behind his impatient parents as Dante does behind his ...”

“... earnest and responsible poet from Wordsworth’s day to ours has needed some litmus-paper, some test that would distinguish the readers who were capable of responding to his provocations from those others who read him only idly and superficially. And The Making of the Reader surveys the different sorts of litmus-paper that poets have used to this ...”

“... movement. This was a period when every new movement was deemed to be significant. Even T.S. Eliot in London in the 1920s heard about the Fugitives and indicated his approval. Tate, though, was not willing to be tagged as a mere regionalist talent. Although still in his early twenties, and haughtily committed to his Southern origins, he hankered for a ...”

“... on the 72 names of God. In fulfilling these structures, Hill has encountered the same problem Eliot did when he conceived of Four Quartets – a symmetrical crown for his life’s work modelled on one poem, ‘Burnt Norton’. The quality-control lapses in the three quartets that followed, especially ‘The Dry Salvages’, are the result of this new ...”

“... kind of poetry each writes. Another poet not willingly on first name terms with the public, T.S. Eliot, once offered a correspondent this explanation for his own limited output: There are only two ways in which a writer can become important – to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little. It is a question of ...”

“... in our own heads. It’s great to see (or see again) the collision of Jorge Luis Borges and T.S. Eliot on the topic of tradition. Both writers get entries (by John Parris Springer, Rick Warner, Timothy Barnard and Lindsey O’Connor) and they had already met in Borges’s essay on Kafka, where he cites Eliot as the source ...”

“... and discounted. The mere thought of Frazer prompts unavoidable and dismissive allusions to George Eliot’s Casaubon and his ‘Key to All Mythologies’, a ‘beguiling and age-old obsession’ that obviously must be resisted. When Frazer, dealt with at the outset, turns up again in his proper historical situation (along with Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, Jane ...”