Describing himself in his mid-fifties as ‘a wambling old codger’, T S Eliot was hardly cut out to be a night-time fire watcher on London’s wartime rooftops. Yet for several nights each week, as first bombs and then V-weapons dropped from the sky, that is what he did. In the most recent volume of his capacious Letters – over a thousand pages covering just the years 1942–4 – there is no shortage of complaints about ill health: flu, exhaustion, muscle tension, strained hands, blood pressure (‘always low … now 104’). Yet in the wake of a long stint fire watching during and after the Blitz, Eliot went on to spend part of each week scanning the Russell Square area of Bloomsbury from skylight level. ‘I don’t like clambering out on roofs,’ he recalled in October 1944, ‘and I was always afraid I should have to tackle a fire-bomb in some dizzy place.’

Like so many other wartime Britons, he had withstood the strains of fascist bombing and so it understandably rankled with Eliot that some in his native America (including the poet Carl Sandburg) called him a ‘fascist’ – an accusation still heard to this day. The younger Eliot had shown interest in fascist thought, but there is a striking contrast in these letters between the poet-publisher-fire watcher who did all sorts of British warwork and his American friend Ezra Pound, who, after broadcasting enthusiastically for Mussolini’s regime in Italy, was arrested by US troops there and charged with treason.

Sometimes one has to stand back from the almost overwhelming daily minutiae of these splendidly edited letters to gain a sense of the larger drama of what is going on. Even then, Eliot’s life is not easy to piece together. Like most of us, he adopts different tones when writing