In this week’s TLS

Can the life be separated from the work? Paying tribute to the capaciousness, depth and forensic brilliance of T. S. Eliot’s criticism in his lead review of The Collected Prose, edited by Archie Burnett, Stephen Romer argues that these volumes represent a “pushback”. Two years ago the release of Eliot’s three-decade-long correspondence with Emily Hale, Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl and a new edition of Mary Trevelyan’s memoir edited by Erica Wagner made for bleak reading about the poet’s emotional cruelty. Yet “if Eliot is so compelling”, writes Romer, “this is in part because we sense that the passionate conviction in the work is intimately related to the trajectory of the life”. “The best of Eliot”, Romer adds, “is when he is silently placing his own drama, and genuinely seeking his own position, within the heart of the poetic, intellectual, political, philosophical or spiritual argument.” But not always the best. His aversion to D. H. Lawrence reveals “nothing so clearly as Eliot’s own profound anxieties about sex, and intimate human relations in general”.

Can we separate the amiable person encountered across the dinner table from their unwelcome political views? Carol Tavris recalls her childhood home, where political opinions ranged from left to right and yet “none of us ever detested a family member we disagreed with, let alone ostracized” them. In modern America, perhaps Britain too, polarized politics can become a social minefield. The T-shirt slogan “Never kissed a Tory” is suggestive. Tavris reviews Joe Pierre’s False and Kenneth Barish’s Bridging Our Political Divide, which advise seeking command ground across enemy lines. From her own acquaintance, Tavris describes Democrats and Republicans who discovered that “their ideological enemies are actually decent, moral, hardworking people who love their children and help their neighbours” – whatever their views about President Trump. When I first went to Washington DC many years ago, Democrats and Republicans would still mingle at social gatherings. Apparently, that’s no longer the case. Yet Congress works best when politicians reach across the aisle to make compromises.

At Soho Place a new production of Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play Kyoto about COP3, the UN World Climate Conference, sounds like a tract for our times. The plot describes “what happens to a world in crisis which doesn’t know how to disagree with itself well”, writes Amber Massie-Blomfield, adding, “its argument is for the grubby power of compromise, in an era that seems ill-equipped to make it”.

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