“... Ford has bad breath and a dirty mind, Norman Douglas is ‘filthy’ and ‘boy shagging’, T.S. Eliot is wrong about the Tarot pack and also (in which case, among many others) about Seneca’s act-division (‘there was a lot of the dilettante about Eliot’), Bernard van Dieren is a ‘dim thing with the grey face in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mystics, examined through the lenses of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot? Sketches of Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Christina of Markyate, Christina the Astonishing, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery ...”

“... man arguing with others in a pub’) and is fascinated by the way he expressed himself. He quotes Eliot’s judgment that Lewis was the greatest English prose stylist of the century. Others, like Anthony Quinton, have called him the worst one. All are right from their own point of view, if we accept that Lewis is a writer who either appeals or does not, but ...”

“... matter.Many American authors just don’t fit into Bloom’s canon. He had a loathing of T.S. Eliot (he generally didn’t think well of American writers who tried very hard to be European) which he overcame enough to claim (in a three-page essay) that Whitman ‘is the daemon of The Waste Land, the corpse planted in its forsaken garden’. The dry ...”

“... radical social experiments were nipped in the bud by the entrenched forces of reaction, while T.S. Eliot’s successors imagine devout cavaliers preserving a unified sensibility in economic and spiritual matters. Apart from the therapy it offers against the perpetual unsatisfactoriness of the present, this construction of the past has the great merit of making ...”

“... precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at an age when most of his ...”

“... lavishing it on the artists he admired, and on many he didn’t, including his former friend T.S. Eliot. Thayer found The Waste Land ‘disappointing’, yet he was its American publisher and gave Eliot the Dial Award, which was worth $2000, the same as his annual salary at the bank. Thayer’s manner could be remote and ...”

“... perfectly at home in the introduction to a student edition thirty years ago. It may be that the task he sets himself – that of taking proper cognisance of reception aesthetics, current bibliography and the more convincing variants of post-structuralism, while nonetheless producing cheerfully definitive thematic readings – is simply impossible. When it ...”

“... grasp the principle of the Jamesian “central intelligence”, as well as the principle that T.S. Eliot would later popularise as the “objective correlative”’. It is quite true that London clearly had the greatest respect for not only literary craft but for the kind of critical principles that were taught at the universities he sporadically attended and ...”

“... with nothing to conceal; a man of intensely “private life”, but wholly transparent’ – T.S. Eliot on Spinoza and, incidentally, on himself. Beckett, I suppose, was such another. He was, though, a writer of the greatest reticence but with everything to reveal. Heartfelt. To the last. Not to the last trump (in which he blessedly did not believe), but to ...”

“... charge against the Los Alamos scientists. Any group of people working intensely on a difficult task against time will find it hard to suppress feelings of comradeship and of pride in their progress, as long, of course, as they do not believe the objective to be fundamentally evil. These feelings are not inconsistent with an awareness of the seriousness of ...”

“... hatband. James goes as far as it is possible to go towards miscegenating Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and The John Curry Spectacular. Even he cannot blink the dullness of television, however. He seeks to pay compliments to soap operas and spectaculars, and curls his lip at avant-gardism, and programmes which ‘Explore the Medium’. But a defensive note ...”

“... Shelley’s radical political beliefs is surely very important. (It was on such grounds that T.S. Eliot rejected him.) Can they really be treated – say, like Milton’s religious ones – as a mere poetical frame? In the long, central discussion of Shelley’s anarchism, Dr Dawson suddenly writes: ‘In the perspective of philosophical anarchism it is moral ...”

“... fear is more intimate and eats into the family and the imagination. One may question with T.S. Eliot whether a civil war ever does end. It may pervade the metabolism of subsequent generations and appear in new psychological and historical traumas, being fed by the memories and passions it feeds, each major crisis leading to other crises. The Greek Civil ...”