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“... and Eliot were up to. It seems odd that Stallworthy has kept his distance. Maybe he agrees with Philip Larkin that the Modernism of Pound and Eliot, like the paintings of Picasso and the jazz of Charlie Parker, was a regrettable diversion from the main issue. In English poetry, the main issue was Hardy, in Larkin’s ...”

“... Philip Larkin once wondered what it would be like for a lover to step inside his skull. ‘She’d be stopping her ears,’ he decided, ‘against the incessant recital/Intoned by reality, larded with technical terms.’ Stepping inside the mind (or prose) of W.G. Sebald elicits a similar reaction – at any rate, it is always a relief to step outside again ...”

“... above the world and contemplating what’s higher still and more untouched – it’s happy in a Philip Larkin sort of way. The happiness both is and isn’t characteristic: Morgan likes his watchers of the skies and likes being one himself, but gets impatient when the drift of clouds becomes the drift into reverie. In ‘Use of Clouds’ he inquires ...”

“... like The Count of Monte Cristo, while believing that what counts is circumstance, not character. Philip Larkin, in ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, describes turning away from grown-up books because, in the end, they offer only the inevitable failures: ‘the dude who lets the girl down . . . seems far too familiar.’ Bánffy’s trilogy becomes more ...”

“... Modernism that displaced it. (A bit further on, there’s another essay which pairs Thomas with Philip Larkin, and clears both of them of the charge of giving in to nostalgia.) The neglect of Thomas and Frost, Edna Longley believes, goes hand-in-hand with the ‘overestimation’ of Pound and Eliot: but I don’t think it’s necessary to discard Pound ...”

“... began fourteen long years in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her as their ‘most underrated author’ in the TLS and she was taken up in a flurry of publicity, interviewed on radio and TV. Quartet in Autumn, the novel she had on the stocks, was subsequently shortlisted for ...”

“... of Holman Hunt and Edward Lear: a place we discover through art. English poets have done better, Philip Larkin in particular. But then England, of all countries, is seen through literature rather than painting. There is the Constable country – but set against that the Brontë country, Hardy’s Wessex and Dickens’s London. Bill Brandt, in a series ...”

“... relate one marvel after another about life up top. The only danger is that we might choke – like Philip Larkin turning the pages of the young lady’s photograph album – on such nutritious images. Towards the end Alan Pryce-Jones chooses a more suitable metaphor: ‘As the years pass just to name old friends is like playing an electronic game in which ...”

“... usually makes his reader care about what he writes. ‘Care’, that is, in the sense in which Philip Larkin in his 1977 Booker speech asked of a novel: ‘If I believed it, did I care about it?’ It was hard, in this instance, to care about what happened to Trevor’s characters, or to Mantel’s. Colliding with unavoidable actualities was what ...”

“... Wilfred Owen (‘Tennyson was a great child: so should I have been but for Beaumont-Hamel’) and Philip Larkin took for granted the legend of the pampered and querulous baby with the august title. Even the title was not quite what it seemed, as Ann Thwaite’s close detective work is able to show. Tennyson did not want it, and there is no doubt that in ...”

“... direction – picturesqueness, psychological embellishment, provision of thrills. You choke, as Philip Larkin has put it in a poem, on such nutritious images. Angela Carter, however, has things well in hand in the radio adaptation. Perhaps this is simply explained. In an introduction to the book, she describes herself as ‘a child of the Radio ...”

“... And yet Connolly’s reputation is probably as high as it has ever been. Nice one, to be sure. Philip Larkin once wrote that Connolly was ‘at his best when able to assimilate his subject into the scenario of his own temperament’. But for connolly such assimilation was compulsive. Almost everything he wrote was touched with woe-begone ...”

“... poets, at least, may be drawing closet to our Irish omphaloskepsis. In a fine essay on the work of Philip Larkin. Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill. Heaney notes that they now seem to feel that the England they once knew is disappearing, and this has ‘driven all three of these writers into a kind of piety towards their local origins’. ‘All three,’ he ...”

“... of Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond ...”

“... of his old buddies, notably members of the group shortly to be christened ‘the Movement’, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis among them. Frank had once told me Wain helped give him an entrée into broadcasting, perhaps introducing him to the long-serving Third Programme producer, Donald Carne-Ross, and although such casual reminiscences are prone to ...”