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“... Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The ...”

“... of his book. It was, according to Szreter, a ‘culture of abstinence’, influential right up to Philip Larkin’s 1963 (when ‘sexual intercourse began’), which mainly drove down the fertility of England and Wales – but probably not that of other Western countries experiencing a comparable decline. On this account, diffusionism is out of the ...”

“... In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady ...”

“... New Verse; F.R. Leavis’s crack about the Sitwells belonging to ‘the history of publicity’; Larkin-Amis’s prize ‘for the book of the year combining the greatest pretension and the least talent: it is called The Osbert’ (Larkin’s spoof award echoed one of Osbert’s own Twenties jests – he had plans then to ...”

“... an interesting slip early in A.S. Byatt’s new novel. It is 1895. A young working-class man, Philip Warren, has been adopted by a liberal upper-class family, the Wellwoods. At the Kentish country home of Olive and Humphry Wellwood, a glorious Midsummer Party is in preparation. Humphry is a banker (though he will soon switch to journalism), and Olive is a ...”

“... because the would-be biographer has just shot – presumably dead – the artist-narrator. Philip Larkin has similarly written a (fairly) friendly hate-poem to his future biographer, although himself so warmly opposed to what he sees as the inhumanity and self-conceit of Modernism as to make some critics read him as if his work were hardly art at ...”

“... sealed off from the family and I couldn’t imagine why they wanted to stay.Like Mr Bleaney in the Larkin poem.Very Mr Bleaney except that they tended to be young. There were one or two junior Army officers who lodged with us. They must have been attached to Catterick, the nearby Army barracks. There were some odd seedy Bleaneyish types who took a fancy to my ...”

“... I was God.’ Once a god, always a god? And yet always a reviser. On other days he can sound like Philip Larkin. Were there two Lowells, or only one? Lowell employed the term ‘dual personality’, a term which belongs to literature, and which also belongs to 19th-century medicine. The meaning of the term has remained uncertain: but it is certain that ...”

“... they tell of how much sleep has been missed, but because they bring the next day nearer. As Philip Larkin, poet of limits, knew so well, sleep has the one big disadvantage that we wake up from it: ‘In time the curtain edges will grow light,’ he wrote in ‘Aubade’, bringing ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. For Tristan and ...”

“... designed, to be ‘asking for it’. Interventions of this kind seem to be less common now. Philip Larkin’s ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ was written in 1962 in response to posters advertising seaside resorts and holiday camps. The laughing girl kneeling on the beach in the poster described in this poem has, within a couple of weeks, become ...”

“... complexity: the rival parties not only playing, as it were, up and down the field but across it. Philip Waller has set out to disentangle the confusions of Liverpool politics and has done so with intense detail. Social history is treated as background to the political narrative, which in its turn becomes an analysis of each succeeding general election with a ...”

“... can now only be done very artificially, when it constitutes a way of life summed up at the end of Philip Larkin’s sardonic poem as ‘reprehensibly perfect’. The natural thing today is to travel as if sitting in a room, an aeroplane or a car. Instant arrival leaves us sitting in another room, waiting for more drops, sprightly or otherwise, from the ...”

“... but some English readers haven’t been willing to let the question of Auden pass so genially. Philip Larkin’s review of Homage to Clio is the document to read, when this response to Auden is in question.Larkin’s view was – and still is, I suppose – that nothing Auden wrote after 1939 added to his ...”

“... And if you quote from memory, get it right. When Andrew Motion, no hero to Amis, says that Larkin’s anthology was meant to promote ‘the taste by which he wished to be relished’ he is adapting a remark of Wordsworth’s – ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is ...”

“... is suicide, or revenge, or any other definite topic. There is a certain relevance in a line from a Philip Larkin poem. ‘Vers de Société’: ‘Only the young can be alone freely.’ Only the young can so detachedly if tormentedly survey the prospect of adult existence as to be lieve that they have the option ‘To be or not to be’; the adult, with ...”