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“... every line, whether mentioned or not, lies imminent danger and disruption.’ He quotes Philip Larkin’s comment in his review of Wilfred Owen’s Collected Poems in 1963: ‘A “war poet” is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust on him,’ and this certainly applies to ...”

“... is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, famous for introducing the term ‘International Style’, assumed, in Johnson’s phrase, that Wright was ‘the greatest American architect of ...”

“... Here’s a novella of slightly over 30,000 very plain words – Philip Roth’s shortest book since The Prague Orgy – structurally straightforward, winnowed of syntactical excitement, sterilised of jokes, rhythmically muted, baldly plotted, low on confrontation, low on tension, low on brilliancies and generally low all round ...”

“... the poem read as being about what it proclaims as its subject: Alexander the Great remembering Philip of Macedon.’ The middle stanza of ‘From an Asian Tent’ reads: You held me once before the army’s eyes; During their endless shout, I tired and slid Down past your forearms to the cold surprise Your plated shoulder made between my thighs. This ...”

“... Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of ...”

“... or disappointment are not far away. The mood of these scenes is often curiously similar to that of Philip Larkin’s novels from two decades before, with their mingling of beery male intimacy, social unease and sexual anxiety. Jill Has Sex, with Metafiction (the comma is here, as always, important) might sum up the bad side of B.S. Johnson’s work from ...”

“... Philip Larkin​ ’s ‘Church Going’, when I read it first, came as a relief. For once, someone had said something true, or almost true, about religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one ...”

“... be misled by his polemic into thinking of him as a reactionary determined to take mentors such as Larkin and Amis au pied de la lettre and never to give vent to an obscure or pretentious line. In general, James’s poetry does not much resemble that of the poets he declares his allegiance to: his temperament is different from theirs. He is more a latterday ...”

“... chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less ...”

“... never the wisest course of action, much less where the author of Briggflatts is concerned.* Philip Larkin’s post-biography/Selected Letters reputational woes are the exception that proves the rule for the modern poet: pass under the biographer’s yoke or enjoy your precious hermit kingdom, but don’t expect to do both. Or if you do expect ...”

“... anything that looks like being a success, in much the same way that Patrick Hamilton’s did. When Philip Roth was selling his millions, and explicit sex was all the rage, Updike competed with Couples, which failed by exaggerating and specialising his natural sense of things, in all the senses of that ancient and convenient word. Things and short stories go ...”

“... men sit and hear each other groan’ and so on), but it would have been more apt to have quoted Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, to which Roth on the subject of fear of not-being hasn’t got a lot to add (as who could?): the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And ...”

“... episodes from the gravitational pull of a goal, contributes to that sense of pointlessness, of, in Larkin’s words, ‘what happened to happen’. The first part of On the Look-Out runs from 1964 to 1945. The opening sections evoke an ordered but quietly odd life. Sisson, then an Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Labour, is a kind of double agent, loyal both ...”

“... Britain’; there had been ‘nothing like it since Inigo Jones’. The great American modernist Philip Johnson praised its ‘distinction’ in the Architectural Review. Local people disliked it, possibly because, as the Smithsons thought, they were unsophisticated but without doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating ...”

“... by virtue of merely being very good. Donald Davie’s Christian Verse is very good. It joins Philip Larkin’s Twentieth-Century Verse to make the most brilliantly interesting Oxford Books of recent years: two books to be read as books are read, and not merely consulted as the OED is consulted. The fact that both Davie and ...”