The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot

I was a student in 1965 when my older brother announced, with a suitably mournful face, that T.S. Eliot had died: a somewhat bizarre conversation followed, in which our father stoutly maintained (tongue firmly in cheek?) that it must be one Tessie Eliot, a little-known music-hall artiste. As a student of English literature, I naturally saw a lot of Eliot – not only the poems but also the ubiquitous references to “Mr Eliot” by literary critics who were, it seemed, nervously looking over their shoulders at the great dictator. As an American fellow-student put it in a parody, “We are...