There is no shortage of books about T.S.Eliot, but this online reissue of Lidia Vianu’s comprehensive study is particularly welcome. It engages with the full range of Eliot’s work and, making good use of anecdotal accounts from other writers’ memoirs, with his complex, contradictory personality. The poems, plays and essays are closely examined with academic rigour but what, for me, makes Lidia Vianu a stimulating guide is the individual character of her response. While scholarly and informed, she is also an engagingly intuitive and independent reader, characterising Eliot’s methods with her own arrestingly metaphorical turns of phrase. At one point she refers to a ‘lotus land of enticing complications’ – nicely suggesting the adventurous spirit with which she immerses herself in the poet’s world and explores its challenging landscape.

John Mole
May 2010