The first volume of  T.S. Eliot’s letters, published in 1988, covered his early life to the end of literary modernism’s annus mirabilis, 1922. The year was a turning point in the thirty-four-year-old Eliot’s career. In November he published the poem that made him famous, ‘The Waste Land’, in the inaugural edition of Criterion, the journal he was to edit until 1939.

That it has taken twenty-two years for the second volume to appear makes two of its features immediately noteworthy. The first is that this is a substantial addition to the readily available primary material about Eliot’s life and work, made all the more welcome by the fact that his estate has, at times, been prickly about making such material accessible. The second is that this long-awaited doorstop only covers three years of Eliot’s life. At this rate, we can look forward to the fifteenth and final volume of correspondence sometime around the end of the twenty-third century. We are still two years shy of Eliot’s religious conversion in 1927; eight years from the breakdown of his first marriage and his disgraceful public comments about ‘free-thinking Jews’; and more than two decades away from his Nobel Prize for Literature. Ahead lies such significant poetry as ‘Ash Wednesday’(1930) and ‘Four Quartets’ (1935–42).