A Critical Difference is a detailed study of perhaps the most intriguing and important literary-critical dialogue of the 1920s. Goldie places the critical writing of T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry firmly in the context of a contentious post-war literary culture and argues for the need to read their work as a series of interventions within that culture. The book traces the development of their criticism from early collaboration on the Athenaeum through to the rivalries between Eliot's Criterion and Murry's Adelphi. It explores the informing contexts of several of Eliot's better-known essays and sheds new light on his role as a polemicist and critical controversialist.