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“... present and declaiming beings whom he could make as vividly present to an audience. Eliot, Auden, Betjeman, by contrast, were mere gibbering shades, without substance or form, borne through the limbo of false modernity. Betjeman was for a short time his pupil, at Magdalen College, and they got on predictably badly, ...”

“... by the Romantics. The ‘Ancient Mariner’ and the Lucy poems must have struck home like early Betjeman, or indeed like Larkin himself. Byron and Pushkin make a particular fetish of not being ‘writers’, and so in his different way did Kipling. These names probably confuse an issue which could be put quite baldly – as by Larkin again – by saying ...”

“... At the start​ of the war, John Piper – who had made his name as an avatar of high abstraction in the mode of Braque and Mondrian, his paintings hanging among the Giacomettis and Calders in the seminal 1936 show Abstract and Concrete – was struggling to get by. His pictures weren’t really selling, and he was living on the £3 10s a week he still got from his mother ...”

“... to study if they didn’t want to. There were no marks or prizes, and no punishments were imposed. John Betjeman described it as ‘a co-educational school to which modern authors and intellectuals send their sons’. Freud had no interest in academic subjects. Instead, he was fascinated by horses, and remained fascinated all of his life. One of his ...”

“... linked to the poet’s continuing ability to produce the right words in the right way. Betjeman had no problem either. It came so naturally to him that an unknown contributor to a New Statesman competition was inspired to at least one immortal line by the thought of the Poet Laureate celebrating a coronation procession: ‘Gosh, the flags at ...”

“... of men like Eliot. But I find it much more strongly represented in such a post-Eliot poet as John Ashbery, who seems to me a true poet of distraction. The back cover of the 1985 paperback of his pleasing and elegant Selected Poems carries a handful of laudatory quotations from previous reviews. What is remarkable is how often they reflect, presumably ...”

“... Scott sentimentality to summon, with bicycle imagery, projections of an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year, work experience prime minister, sleepwalking through the job, as a profile-raising photo opportunity between serious employment in the banking and conference-addressing industries, blundered into a reprise of Orwell’s cycling ...”

“... material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... Fleet River, dossing down near Smithfield Market, finds himself following in the footsteps of John Betjeman and his Cloth Fair blue plaque. It’s impossible to get away. Legions of the infamously famous, settling on a pleasantly obscure corner of London in which to ferment quiet subversion, find themselves part of the franchise: the freedom offered ...”

“... foreign readers (not only the English-speakers) to just the degree that among the compatriots of Betjeman and Larkin and Adrian Mitchell he is a prophet without much honour; and there has not been lacking the rather plain implication: ‘Go and live with those furriners that like you so much.’ But Tomlinson won’t go away; and he insists on publishing in ...”

“... vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the arch-Victorianist and founder of Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ (originally called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’), admired the design, to the point where he wrote a letter of appreciation to Lasdun: ‘I gasped with ...”

“... unoccupied for more than two minutes they would inevitably bugger each other. I share with Sir John Betjeman the fate of having been educated at a public school so steeped in the Arnold tradition that, when we were there, water closets were doorless: but perhaps the Laureate was exaggerating when, later in life, he said that he did not have a bowel ...”

“... tense. Clive Jenkins is a smiling serpent, Muggeridge has an accusing face and defensive hands. Betjeman, looking amusingly miserable, is on his knees. Among the bull’s-eyes are Robin Day, Ian Paisley, David Owen, Douglas Hurd, Kenneth Baker, David Mellor, Alan Bennett. There are a few outers: Jonathan Miller, Stephen Spender, Alfred Brendel, Melvyn Bragg ...”

“... and he opens with a marvellous one – surely his own discovery – by the Medieval chronicler John Lydgate, about a horse called Lyarde, too old now to work. They lead him to the smithy to pull off his shoon And put him to greenwood, there for to gone. The idea is echoed by Larkin, also well represented here, in his poem about race horses, ‘At ...”