"The racism and mirthless obscenity of the King Bolo pieces, like the utterly tedious Columbiad, are a form of punishment, like being locked in at the Ivy League equivalent of an interminable rugby club dinner. Hamlet says of his father, ‘He was a man. Take him for all in all’, and we must do the same for Eliot, while wondering how grateful he himself might be for such liberal consideration." Sean O'Brien • Independent "Does this edition matter? Of course. I am so pleased to have lived to see it. “Eliot wrote nothing that is not of interest,” said Ricks at an event at the British Library on Monday. Is it where to begin? Of course not. “Anyone who reads Larkin for the first time in that edition [the scholarly Archie Burnett] needs his head seen to,” said Ricks. “Or her head. Equal opportunities.”" David Sexton • Evening Standard "Ricks has written of his dislike of “intertextuality”, preferring “allusion”, but the Eliot echo chamber mapped in the notes is distinguished by the amount of references it turns up to Milton, Keats and Tennyson – favourite poets of Ricks – rather than to a poet such as Yeats, who is less favoured by that editor. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot writes at the end of The Waste Land. Might the sheer mass of allusions uncovered in Eliot’s simplest utterance be sand-bags piled against the hostile claims of canonical rivals?" David Wheatley • Guardian

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