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“... world. One judgment about Lewis bound to cause offence was voiced by his admirer and former pupil John Wain, who observed in 1964 that ‘his writing improves as it gets further from the popular and demagogic.’ That latter adjective may sound harsh and inexact, but on occasion in his apologetics it does seem as though Lewis wrote to please the crowd ...”

“... a largely domestic taste. There was a time when almost every home had a reproduction of The Hay Wain. Tours of ‘Constable country’ on the Essex-Suffolk border were popular by 1893 and are still going strong. It all contributes to the image of a local artist painting agreeable scenes. Those who have looked more closely at his work have seen more in ...”

“... inequality of wealth, speak of the same world as Peterley’s but seen from the opposite angle,’ John Wain has written. ‘There is no evidence that Peterley worries about social injustice, or thinks about it at all, for that matter.’ With whatever undertow of self-disapproval, Richard Pennington rises from an inferior social position through the ...”

“... him in his new survey of post-war fiction. In the late Fifties and after, Kingsley Amis, Johns Wain and Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Co struck a new, demotic note. The ‘traditional’ English novel of good and bad manners was radicalised and updated. Karl Miller helped to institute a new criticism which seemed to owe more to a modest, clean, unadorned ...”

“... to ornament with appropriate curlicues the exposition of order and harmony in a poem like Sir John Davies’s Orchestra. In what might be called the new decorated style, or modern Elizabethan, the decoration has become an end in itself, serving only to embellish the sense of time passing, water dripping, bells ringing, clothes flying on the line. There is ...”

“... anti-psychiatry movement.) Most gripping were the magnificently demented illustrations of Louis Wain (1860-1939), a hugely popular British artist who after a successful international career as an illustrator and cartoonist, spent the last ten years of his life in an asylum near St Albans. Wain specialised in comic ...”

“... independence, or irresponsibility, is all the more striking because it was always there. Amis, Wain, even Conquest, were once conventionally of the left, as the thing to be: Larkin gave it all the cold shoulder. And they remained politicised in a way that he did not. He made fun of it all in his own way, as the late poem ‘Aubade’ makes a joke and a ...”

“... to be different from the rest, unless it was that they could not bear very much reality. ‘Wain’ meaning ‘embarrassing’, for example, ‘honky’ meaning ‘common’ or ‘ill-bred’, and ‘to nim’ meaning ‘to pee’, do not bring out the qualities of the words they conceal; in fact they provide the wrong associations. Every proper name ...”

“... and his own diagnosis of Larkin’s virtues. Long ago, the Poet Laureate referred to him as ‘the John Clare of the building estates’, a decidedly quaint though no doubt a heartfelt compliment, in line with Eric Homberger’s later summing-up of Larkin as ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’, or the more magisterial pronouncement that his ...”

“... and name-dropping. Not surprisingly, Lowell was not amused. The same disapproval fills his ‘John Wain’s Letters to Five More Artists’. The target is not just the peculiarly discursive poetry Wain invented in Wildtrack and its sequel, but the poet himself, who is presented as lacking proportion in marshalling ...”

“... only really switched on the power in the 1950s. Novelists such as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, John Hearne, Andrew Salkey and V.S. Naipaul were among the first voices from the outposts of Empire to talk back. Not for them ‘clapping his hands and stamping his feet’ in order to communicate, like Conrad’s fireman (‘and he had filed ...”

“... to balls up both industry and heritage. Grangemouth Dockyard, the catalogues of Burmeister and Wain and the Motor Ship returned to mind when, researching the history of North Sea oil, I spent much of my time, troglodytic, in the cellar of the university library in Tübingen, working my way through back numbers of the Economist and the Financial Times, and ...”

“... year after Swinburne died. It has only appeared previously in the Cornhill Magazine, introduced by John Sparrow. Housman never authorised its publication, remarking to a friend that it was not bad but ‘not good enough for me’. It is marvellous about the poet’s use of anapaests, and sarcastic about his analogies, notably of a golden table that was as high ...”

“... jumped, they fell, they cried. They played with dolls and flicked cherrystones at one another. John Dee, the Elizabethan astronomer and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. Francis Segar, trying to ...”

“... and reads like a Fifties novel of provincial life, though not one written by him so much as by John Wain or Keith Waterhouse. Indeed Ruth sounds (or Larkin makes her sound) like Billy Liar’s unsatisfactory girlfriend, whose snog-inhibiting Jaffa Billy hurls to the other end of the cemetery. Having laid out a grand total of 15s. 7d. on an evening ...”