Denis Donoghue writes:

The most attractive quality of Raine's mind, in this book, is its vivacity, its enthusiasm, its racy pleasure in turning aside to compare a detail in Eliot with something in Nabokov, Kundera or Lawrence. We hear of Raine's friends, James Fenton, Martin Amis; of Heaney's Station Island; harshly of Walcott: 'In Omeros (Chapter XII), you can see Derek Walcott's botched, fatally indebted copy of Eliot when he describes his encounter with his father Warwick's ghost: Eliot's drained pool full of mystical water becomes a defunct fountain where, "it seemed", "water sprang in plumes."' The most controversial part of the new book is likely to be the first appendix, 'Eliot and Anti-Semitism'. Raine (correctly in my view) interprets the questionable poems – mainly 'Gerontion' and 'Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar' – as dramatic monologues and therefore exempt from attribution to Eliot in his personal capacity.

Oxford | hardback 202 |ISBN: 9780195309935