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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Four Quartets
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(1944) Four poems by T.S. *Eliot, which he saw as a single work though each had already been published separately. 'Burnt Norton' (1935), 'East Coker' (1940), 'The Dry Salvages' (1941) and 'Little Gidding' (1942) combine to form a complex meditation on human experience and memory; the theme of 'time present and time past' is announced in the opening words of 'Burnt Norton'. The tone is specifically Christian, very different from the nihilism of The *Waste Land. Each of the four poems relates to a specific place: Burnt Norton is a garden in the Cotswolds; East Coker a Somerset village which had been the home of Eliot's ancestors; the Dry Salvages a group of rocks off the coast of Massachusetts; and Little Gidding a village in East Anglia, where Nicholas Ferrar established a utopian Christian community in the 17C.
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