The Literary Society and John Bailey, and in more recent times, Anthony Powell, Siegfried Sassoon, A. A. Milne, Kingsley Amis, John Gross, Antonia Fraser, Tom Stoppard, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Claire Tomalin, Charles Moore, Miriam Gross, V. S. Naipaul, Sebastian Faulks, Antony Beevor and P. D. James. The Literary Society has not obtruded on public notice, with the brief exception of its meetings and personalities in the middle of the twentieth century which were regularly documented in the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, in which are frequent vignettes of the members of the 1950s and 60s, including John Betjeman, T. S. Eliot, Malcolm Sargent, Alan Lascelles and
T. S. Eliot for the authorship of one scene and the choruses. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin Browne for the production of "The Rock", and later commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, "Murder in the Cathedral", concerning the death of the martyr, Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot], "Murder in the Cathedral" and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry but it also offered a convenient home for his