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“... for the distorting power of what is, by any measure, the richest single source, the letters to Philip Larkin. Some 530 of these survive, almost half of which were printed in Leader’s edition, predominantly from the 1940s and 1950s, the period of their greatest intimacy. They wrote to amuse each other but also to outdo each other, especially in ...”

“... Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech Movement, Cox returned to ...”

“... a big chunk of plot about an ex-girlfriend trying to persuade him that his real father was Philip Larkin. Amis doesn’t try too hard to persuade the reader that this is all of a seamless piece. Instead he adds more seams. ‘Welcome! Do step on in – this is a pleasure and a privilege. Let me help you with that,’ the book begins. ‘Now what ...”

“... find Dorn, the Black Mountaineer and poet of the American Dream Post-Modernised, honouring Davie, Larkin’s one-time ally and fellow Movementeer, a native of Barnsley who retired to Devon, is puzzling only if one doesn’t acknowledge the range of Davie’s work. Since most people don’t, Dorn’s graceful homage seems a good place to start, not least ...”

“... embarrassment that I preferred not to think about. I don’t mean that I woke up screaming, like Philip Larkin at the thought of being made Poet Laureate. It was simply that I assumed that the whole silly business would have been abolished long before my healthy and vigorous father was gathered in by the Reaper. It is true that renunciation is now ...”

“... find mental distress in the problem of building a structure for the unemployed day. For many, as Philip Larkin has sadly written, ‘the view does not exist’ – ‘where has it gone, this lifetime?’ The problems of adjustment should not be glossed over. Peter Laslett’s book should be seen as a call to action rather than a factual survey. We need ...”

“... brink of literary breakthrough. In the dustjacket photograph on this book he looks like a hirsute Philip Larkin, the scar carefully touched out, a reminder in his suit, collar and tie of the days when the Left dressed just like the Right. When his fame seemed finally sealed with the filming of Rope, Hitchcock brutally removed the screenplay from his ...”

“... is missing from the book. So are Muriel Spark, V.S. Naipaul, and the explosive William Golding. Philip Larkin is present. Not really for his poems as for the tirelessly sardonic and sarcastic bulletins on national life sent in letters to his friend Monica Jones. Larkin’s offendedness was soothed twenty years on ...”

“... 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 his native ...”

“... 1979) are at an all-time high, helped by the timely publication of her letters; while shares in Philip Larkin (d. 1985) are at an all-time low, helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way down, Robert Lowells (d. 1977, with the Collected Poems coming next year) are a good buy; stock in Anthony Burgess ...”

“... to a domestic deathbed. This vision of dying brings to mind Motion’s moving elegy for Philip Larkin, in his previous collection Natural Causes (1987), which evokes Larkin facing death, not at home, but in a ‘nursing home’, and records his remark on the uselessness of poetic rehearsals of one’s ...”

“... at Dartmouth let him recall horrible schooldays at Worcester, at Hull he had a Lebanese meal with Philip Larkin. ‘But I like mushy food, it’s the only food I really enjoy now,’ Larkin maintained. There is no evidence that Raban discovered, on land or sea or sky, what makes his country tick. He made such ...”

“... trying to understand or at least come to terms with bebop (even the passionate jazz-conservative Philip Larkin eventually felt he had to make a gesture in this direction), but I don’t know how far I succeeded, except for an admiration for Thelonious Monk and an immediate passion for the supremely talented and intelligent Dizzy Gillespie, the most ...”

“... young woman loaned by the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull whom I’d most like to know. She surely gave Philip Larkin the cue when he wished for a friend’s newborn daughter to be neither ‘ugly nor good-looking/Nothing uncustomary’, but bent on that ‘unemphasised, enthralled/Catching of happiness’ that sustains a well-lived life.Encounters are ...”

“... the end of the performance, I was in tears (and so, incidentally, was my companion that afternoon, Philip Larkin, who admired her poems but who had, I think, never met her). The ‘hey-ho’ was in fact part of the tears. One merit of Frances Spalding’s excellent critical biography is that it helps to restore to Stevie Smith her dignity. Her earlier ...”