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“... the second in a projected sequence one could almost call ‘A Dance to the Music of Time and Motion’. The first, The Pale Companion, was a mannered rites-of-passage tale set in 1968, and received fairly mixed reviews – a reception evidently forgotten by Viking, who call it ‘acclaimed’ on the dust-wrapper. ...”

“... parts. That first experiment was quadrilingual, and Airborn is a bilingual variant ‘in slow motion’: alternating sections of sonnets were passed to and fro by correspondence. There were two linked sequences of four sonnets each, on the theme of ‘House’ and of ‘Day’, translated where appropriate, so that the end-product exists entire in both ...”

“... thus salutes a distinguished predecessor. Yet there is nothing particularly Wordsworthian about Andrew Motion’s book. The only character who uses the expression ‘in the blood’ is the poet’s father, and what he means is that when the time comes Andrew is bound to enjoy hunting. There is little evidence here of ...”

“... contents page: Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too obvious to need repeating, for the inclusion of well-known ...”

“... Penguin of 1962, The New Poetry, selected and introduced by A. Alvarez. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion are well aware that there is something comically factitious about the stance that has to be adopted by each new spokesman on the poetry scene – ‘we are not,’ they say, ‘the first anthologists this century to have made such a ...”

“... In the midst of writing his biography of Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion was contacted by a spiritualist who claimed to have been speaking to Larkin in the Beyond; later Larkin sent a posthumous word of approval for the book. Could the cosmic wires have been crossed and could the spiritualist have been talking to Martin Seymour-Smith? For this massive biography of Hardy – or ‘Tom’, as Seymour-Smith chummily calls him – has the vehemence of divine revelation and the fervour of personal mission ...”

“... itself. The admission of rival sentiments comes to appear merely a nuance of the mind’s habit. Andrew Motion’s way of making sense is to imagine something, then something else apparently quite different, and let the poem accommodate both imaginings with or without specifying the relation between them. A girl and her father, quarrelling; the girl and ...”

“... of the facts of Keats’s life and its English context. Thirty years have passed since then, and Andrew Motion remarks, reasonably enough, in the Introduction to his new life of Keats, that ‘the lives of all important writers need to be reconsidered at regular intervals, no matter how familiar they might be’: The Keats that has come down to us is ...”

“... of course, not hers. Eva died in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was ...”

“... Andrew 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 The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... Marriage, mortality, memory, the onset of middle age and the pressure of children criss-cross Andrew Motion’s latest collection. Should we treat the vivid images and incidents that comprise this volume as fragments to be fused into a unity? We might try to construct a single protagonist: a man entering mid-life, married, a father, aware of his own mortality and that of others, slipping at moments through the doors of memory into his childhood, into his adolescence, into an earlier, failed relationship ...”

“... liked him. Seamus Heaney of course liked him, but so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of Norway, though 48 years ago for small reward he was teaching me geography in ...”

“... with other great writers, everyone has their own Larkin. Mine is not that of his biographer Andrew Motion, whose good intentions seem to speak from beyond too great a gap in culture and ...”

“... as difficult as all that. Take ‘A German Requiem’, which, as he explains in an interview with Andrew Motion in a recent issue of Poetry Review, was originally called ‘Elegy’: but the title was changed to help out English readers. Need it have been? The setting is clearly a German city, probably Berlin, the time the late Forties or early Fifties ...”

“... manners and pleasures are compatible with an uninterrupted dedication to the craft of music. Andrew Motion has said that what he wants from a biography is information about commonplace matters, such as haircuts, so he will approve the young Britten’s assiduity in recording his. Every three weeks or so he is off to Whiteley’s in London, or ...”