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“... from the Centre rather than by any real, or pure, representative of a Left or a Right. Certainly Maurice Larkin does not seem to think it has, although he does not address himself specifically to the problem in any analytical manner. He prefers to write about ‘the traditional multi-directional split of the electorate’ on certain deeply-felt ...”

“... in their day, not least in the classrooms – whom he has not scrupled to exclude: ‘E.V. Lucas, Maurice Hewlett, “Alpha of the Plough”, Robert Lynd, Christopher Morley in America, and a hundred others.’ The Lucases and the Lynds, I remember, were still esteemed presences in or behind the book that I got as a school prize; and the anathema that has ...”

“... were the ones everybody was reading, all published by Faber: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell and, of course, Heaney. It seems extraordinary, now, that my father had known several of them. Larkin had been his friend in Belfast (and my mother’s boss in the library at Queen’s), and, later, at the ...”

“... joys and sorrows go straight back to the early Romantics. He is not a bit like Hardy and Philip Larkin, who are often associated with him. No comparison could be more misleading. Their idiom is one of deprivation, of that pleasure in things going wrong, or never having been right, which has become so much a part of English culture and consciousness. But ...”

“... Only a few months after the first, revelatory, biography of Philip Larkin there come two new lives – whether they are ‘revelatory’ will need pondering – of Michel Foucault. It is a suggestive coincidence. The one an exemplar of humanism, the other a grand exponent of anti-humanism, they are about the best in the way of writers their two countries have lately produced, and at their death they seemed to leave as great a hole ...”

“... much sign that Micheldene or his creator did feel sorry afterwards. The Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling, who overlapped with Amis’s circle in the early 1960s when Amis was in his pomp, spoke of their having ‘a doctrine about being rude’, a topic on which Cowling spoke with some authority. One of the phrases that crops up most often in ...”

“... if a reader construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ an interviewer once asked Larkin. ‘I should think he was talking balls,’ came the robust reply. But most writers might accept that, in reality, proceedings are only ever partially under their conscious control: the old poets would have called this ‘inspiration’. ‘I don’t ...”

“... the sickness of our age; Offers the ugly, glamour; the hopeless, hope. Compare these pieces to Larkin’s advertising poems, such as ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ or ‘Send No Money’; or ‘Essential Beauty’, with its ambivalent response to the vast billboards that ‘Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise/Of motor-oil and cuts of ...”

“... Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of ...”

“... to try for a Blue. (My jealousy is out of control.) Gardner arranged to have him supervised by Maurice Bowra, who in turn introduced him to Bethel Solomons, who gave him tea and persuaded Mrs Yeats to receive him. Stallworthy charmed her, too, and she gave him the run of the manuscripts. Singing School recites these occasions and brings the story of ...”

“... discernible gift was for burning his visitors’ toast: ‘Any normal person would want to wire Maurice up to this obsolete toaster and pass several hundred volts through him,’ Carey wrote, which is just the sort of Tom and Jerry violence that Jim Dixon wishes he could direct at his own appalling head of department – he wants ‘to tie Welch up in his ...”

“... he gives us the notorious ‘Down with Dons’ (1975), which hammers donnish cults such as that of Maurice Bowra, claims that dons tend to be insolent and bumptious and to have insolent and bumptious children, calls them ‘envious careerists’ devoting their time to petty intrigue, and snobs who despise the non-dons who support them. Undergraduates are not ...”

“... Philip Larkin​ ’s ‘Church Going’, when I read it first, came as a relief. For once, someone had said something true, or almost true, about religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one ...”

“... lichen but chewing gum. 23 March. That Ted Hughes should have got into Poets’ Corner ahead of Larkin wouldn’t have surprised Larkin, though he must surely have a better claim. Two deans back, and not long after Larkin’s death, I remember Michael Mayne saying that ...”

“... of such encounters because Smith’s admirers often treat her as something of a pet. Although Larkin’s review of Selected Poems in 1962 drew attention to her achievement, he called her drawings ‘cute’ while noting that some of her phrases, though not ‘full-scale’ poems, hung around in one’s mind ‘long after one has put the book down in ...”