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“... Aristophanes Well, Anthony, by now the secret’s out Of what this book is really All About. The heavyweights have weighed in in your praise With mighty line and lapidary phrase Whereby both Life and Death are shown to be Imbued with enigmatic majesty. To celebrate your fifty years ...”

“... poets had suddenly acquired a slightly messy family life.Apparently, it could have been messier. Anthony Thwaite has decided not to include various squibs and limericks (these will appear later on in Larkin’s Letters), and has also ruled against certain of Larkin’s unfinished pieces; he mentions an ‘attempt at a long poem called “The ...”

“... One of Anthony Thwaite’s poems, ‘Tell it slant’, swerves from Emily Dickinson’s line ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant’ to settle upon an aesthetic procedure she would have been too nervous to enunciate: Truth is partial. Name the parts But leave the outline vague and blurred. Dickinson thought the truth should dazzle gradually, and that the best ploy was ‘circuit ...”

“... Ted Hughes (‘boring old monolith, no good at all – not a single solitary bit of good’) and Anthony Powell, aka ‘the horse-face dwarf’. There is even a ‘Hi, Ian’: he calls me ‘the Kerensky of poetry’. Not too bad, I thought at first. Alas, though, the book’s editor advises me that Larkin almost certainly meant to say Dzerzhinsky, or ...”

“... series might be directed at the number of familiar names on the contents page: Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good ...”

“... alcoholic) until his death in December 1985. She hardly left the house after this – according to Anthony Thwaite, who edited this collection – and died in February 2001. These letters are very different from those collected in the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-85. Those were spirited, eloquent, witty (anyone who met Larkin would have been ...”

“... wide-swinging relativism the uncommitted term ‘voice’ has a special part to play. The title of Anthony Thwaite’s Victorian Voices seems to go beyond a use of the word to describe the Browningesque dramatic quality of these 14 verse monologues. It suggests also his subjects’ ambiguous relation with the real, their semi-symbolic function: they are ...”

“... first take a reader aback. Most of the 80 new poems drawn from notebooks and added by the editor, Anthony Thwaite, are unrecognisable as Larkinian. Many of them are early: only very slowly, between 1946 and 1953 – this last the year in which the poet was 30 – did he come to write ‘like himself’. His earliest verse of quality is the pastiche ...”

“... 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 reverential quality in ...”

“... masks. Small print tells us that these selections are from Larkin’s Selected Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite – one of the keepers of Larkin’s flame, an executor. The other executors are Andrew Motion, Larkin’s authorised biographer, and Monica Jones, Larkin’s longtime companion. It was Miss Jones who undertook the destruction of the 25 ...”

“... than he did before. The problem is not simply that of the gap between life and literature, for Thwaite’s collection spans them, adding to anecdotes of the life criticism of the writing. The trouble is that the actual poet seems to elude both. The anecdotal richness of the first half (Noel Hughes on the schooldays, Amis on Larkin as an ...”

“... companion and lover, but never wife. The publication, in 2010, of Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite, changed the earlier impression of Larkin’s mind and personality, especially the early ‘scandalous’ picture derived from Thwaite’s edition of Larkin’s Selected Letters (1992). In his introduction ...”

“... early 1970s but loathed it. ‘Never again,’ he said, no matter the money. A number of writers, Anthony Thwaite among them, taught in Kuwait or the desert emirates and had stories of segregated classrooms and beheadings.‘You’re a traveller?’ Dorothy Pritchett said to me, and, giggling in anticipation, ‘Do you have a rooksack?’ Puffing his ...”

“... Levin(Sunday Times)Blake Morrison(TLS)John Nicholson(Times)Richard Rayner(Time Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher Wordsworth(Guardian)UnfavourablePaul Ableman(Spectator)Robert Cottrell(Financial Times)Martyn Goff(Daily Telegraph)John ...”

“... overdoses on it. He had a weakness for lines like ‘Cantilena to their klangschönheit’; when Anthony Thwaite was told some of Porter’s poems were being translated into German, he is said to have asked if they weren’t in German already. Though Porter came to be lauded in England, it was sometimes for his weaker performances. Not The Cost of ...”