“... compounds irony with pathos. At times, to an English reader, he seems not light-years away from Philip Larkin: but this is probably only a trick of the light and of the angle from which we come at him. For we are told, and in places can see for ourselves, that both his melancholy and his irony can be called ‘savage’ and ‘corrosive’ – epithets ...”

“... prone to congratulate themselves on being out of step with their times), or perhaps, to take up Larkin’s more familiar idiom, one of ‘the less deceived’. Even though we haven’t even got to the contents page, we’re starting to catch a whiff of the ‘no bullshit’ bullshit that is one of Hitchens’s trademarks. The epigraph is from Proust ...”

“... was ‘a Cambridge passion for Eng. Lit… . combined with a rather taking bully-boy strut’. Philip Hobsbaum, also alert to Gunn, took the view that the poem ‘Carnal Knowledge’ was ‘slick’ and ‘execrable’. Alvarez, as Wootten notes, reviewed Gunn’s first book twice. In one review, he called the collection ‘for my money, the most ...”

“... to metonymy and plain speech’, and ‘a renewed interest in narrative’. Their leader was not Larkin but Heaney, who ‘delights in language’ and yet also benefits from ‘a larger historical framework’. For quite a few of those yoked together by their ‘common purpose’ – ‘to extend the imaginative franchise’ – the perspective of children ...”

“... epic in the register of the humdrum, a tendency Heaney once neatly characterised by saying, ‘if Philip Larkin had ever composed his version of The Divine Comedy he would probably have discovered himself not in a dark wood but a railway tunnel halfway on a journey down England.’ That domestication of epic, in which allusions to heroic fictions at once ...”

“... makes him – so fatigued, thin-skinned and full of teenage chagrin – come alive on the page. Philip Larkin once described Sue in Jude the Obscure as ‘too irritating not to have been a real person’. (You see what he means: ‘I couldn’t bear to let you go – possibly to Arabella again – and so I got to love you, Jude.’) Nikolai’s jibes ...”

“... who eat all my time, the books unread and unwritten. And casting a shadow over it all is what Philip Larkin called ‘extinction’s alp’, no longer a stable peak in a distance, finally becoming rising ground. I could identify only one passage in this 400-page book that rang false. Smith is almost always thoughtful and unpretentious when writing ...”

“... also an internationalist, deeply hostile to the Little Englandism of many of his peers, notably Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He wrote a book about Czeslaw Milosz, translated many poems from Polish and Russian. In his memoir, These the Companions, he describes what he improbably calls F.R. Leavis’s charm, but the hero of the book is the ...”

“... again.’ Sandbrook’s touch is sure on those cultural areas which are clearly to his taste (from Philip Larkin via James Bond to Dad’s Army); his own affections lead him to spot nostalgia in places you wouldn’t immediately expect to find it. However, his tastes and affections contribute to a thesis which is in itself suspect, and whose generalities ...”

“... lesson came from the work of other living poets who used form. Tim introduced me to the poetry of Philip Larkin, whom again, ignorant economist that I was, I only knew as the compiler of The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. But as I read Larkin (whose poem beginning, ‘The trees are coming into ...”

“... As I was starting to write this I came across a poem by Philip Larkin, the last part of which reads: And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is as clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist. And what’s the profit? Only that, in time We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home ...”

“... think worth while ‘What’s Become of Wystan?’ was the title of a sharp review by Philip Larkin, which began by imagining a pair of readers, one of the early Auden and one of the later, talking entirely at cross-purposes as ‘one spoke of a tremendously exciting English social poet full of energetic unliterary knockabout and unique ...”

“... Tennyson knew this particular story. Do you read through every book given to you as a present? Philip Larkin, reviewing Ricks’s 1969 edition, singled out the lines ‘O why have they not buried me deep enough’ as shapeless and unrhythmical; he managed to find a Larkinesque side of Tennyson to admire (‘Northern Farmer, New Style’), but the ...”

“... fretting to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. Philip Larkin (sans bicycle clips) with a Byronic makeover. Larkin reimagined by Barbara Cartland, all scowls and flashing coattails, piercing glances. This wholesome, outdoorsy Englishness, bracing weather and privatised ...”

“... in English literature – for example, in the poetry of Hardy, Stevie Smith and especially Philip Larkin: Only a numbness registered the shock Of finding out how much had gone of life, How widely from the others. It may be that England is now becoming a cheap and nasty place, but Raban allows us no consolation in nostalgia. Emma Tennant is less ...”