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 [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind." In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past." This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work