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“... world.’ What might Treasure Island look like, then, if it grew up a bit? Perhaps something like Andrew Motion’s novel Silver: Return to Treasure Island. It’s 1802 and Jim Hawkins is now in his fifties; his son, Jim Junior, the main narrator, is nearly 18. So the younger Jim is a little older than Stevenson’s narrator (Jim Hawkins was around ...”

“... from Hamilton; also Alun Lewis, Roy Fuller, Frost and Graves. But Wilbur and Merrill, Heaney and Motion? I’m not surprised there’s little evidence of attachment to their work, just oblique dismay. For any sort of poetic credo, you have to go back to the poems, or the essays in A Poetry Chronicle (1973), and even there it’s scattered: ‘no point-making ...”

“... and ... the “difficulty” of modernism’. By so doing, according to Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, they helped to ‘extend the imaginative franchise’. Here the author missed an opportunity to develop an earlier point, a good Post-Modern point about the desirability of making casually selective use of the past and the cultural ...”

“... Morrison’s introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, co-written with Andrew Motion, is apposite: ‘Whereas Raine and Reid re-interpret the world through their use of simile, a number of other young poets have done so through the art of narrative ... we are often presented with stories that are incomplete, or are denied what ...”

“... There has recently been the quarrel between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit incest with his daughter, and if he did should the public know about it? The reluctance of his estate ...”

“... Rome. And now Jerusalem is dust in the sun, His skies are blue. He’s coming, child, I come.’ Andrew Motion’s Dangerous Play consists of six poems from The Pleasure Steamers (1978), the poem Independence (1981), 16 poems from Secret Narratives (1983), and seven uncollected poems, including a long prose-passage, ‘Skating’, a memoir of his ...”

“... Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The sign could say: “Up here, something did happen to Andrew O’Hagan. Like each of us, he wondered if it would happen. And it did.”’ Something happened to my second ever schoolteacher, Mrs Wallace. We saw her totally somethinged in her coffin under a huge crucifix of Jesus Christ, to whom, by the look of the ...”

“... out. The trouble with making a career around Larkin is that the output is quite small, and others, Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite, have already picked the meat out of the life. What’s left after a couple of books of literary criticism wouldn’t amount to a serious life’s work for a mayfly. Or shouldn’t. There is, however, an unmistakable ...”

“... The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth from childhood to manhood, and the father’s from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship. The father’s absences and absent-mindedness, his tempers, adulteries and workaholism, his patronising of his wife and children – these sins and omissions are meticulously totted up ...”

“... which characterises the ‘poem’ of Lisa Erdman; there was skill in it, but it was at best, as Andrew Motion said in the TLS, ‘impressively unlikeable’. In The White Hotel the pornography is more calculatingly deployed. The rioting fantasy which constituted the kind of ‘free novel’ Thomas wanted to write is ironised by those sections which are ...”

“... where it came from and why it is worth stealing. 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 whole thing there), his plain-but-emotional rhythms and syntax remind one of Larkin and even Andrew Motion. A more surprising influence is Eliot: ‘My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark’ has the sort of rhythmical hysteria and claustrophobic shadowiness that Hamilton has made his own; and a line from ‘La Figlia Che ...”

“... Larkin elegies have the authentic plangency of E.J. Thribb. The best, as yet uncollected, is by Andrew Motion, and was first published in the TLS. ‘This is your subject speaking’ is a long poem, with a powerful and complex narrative drive. In the final section, Motion visits Larkin in the nursing-home where he ...”

“... Twenty​ years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife ...”

“... when it did, must have been hard for Larkin to endure. Or maybe he didn’t give a toss. Come in, Andrew Motion. It is unusual for a writer’s letters – all foreground and virtually no background – to come out in advance of a biography (Motion’s Life will be coming out next year), and the Amis connection is just ...”