Two long essays: The Idea of a Christian Society on the direction of religious thought toward criticism of political and economic systems; and Notes towards the Definition of Culture on culture, its meaning, and the dangers threatening the legacy of the Western world.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.