“... odds with all these changes in his world. Some of the changes are more significant than others. In Philip Roth’s novel Sabbath’s Theatre, the ageing, suicidal Mickey Sabbath is saved by the mechanical marvels of another generation. He finds a box marked ‘Morty’s Things’ in an unopened drawer – the box holds his brother’s possessions, returned to ...”

“... Wife’ – but the most singular and most effective poem in the whole collection is a parody of Philip Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ called ‘The Larkin Automatic Car Wash’. Like all good parodies, it is not only an act of homage but a precision instrument revealing the full capabilities and depth of its ...”

“... mattered to him, including early Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Rilke, some Forrest Reid, Patrick Kavanagh, Philip Larkin (‘His work will outwear his own time and all its fashionable gases,’ he wrote to Monteith after Larkin’s death), and, later, Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy, the stories of Alistair MacLeod and John ...”

“... No wonder so many writers have admired and loved him, including Hemingway, John O’Hara, Philip Larkin and Eudora Welty, whose ‘Powerhouse’, probably the best story about jazz, was written in 1939 (published in 1941) after she had seen Waller perform a one-night stand with a ragtag big band in her home town of Jackson, Mississippi. Her ...”

“... as himself in the 1680s and 1690s, then what we mean is that the poet learns an art of survival. Philip Larkin once told an interviewer that there is one significant fact about poets that all interviewers ought to know. Poets, he said, don’t write what they want to write; they write what they must. Dryden’s career has its strange features, because ...”

“... Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The ...”

“... of his book. It was, according to Szreter, a ‘culture of abstinence’, influential right up to Philip Larkin’s 1963 (when ‘sexual intercourse began’), which mainly drove down the fertility of England and Wales – but probably not that of other Western countries experiencing a comparable decline. On this account, diffusionism is out of the ...”

“... In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady ...”

“... New Verse; F.R. Leavis’s crack about the Sitwells belonging to ‘the history of publicity’; Larkin-Amis’s prize ‘for the book of the year combining the greatest pretension and the least talent: it is called The Osbert’ (Larkin’s spoof award echoed one of Osbert’s own Twenties jests – he had plans then to ...”

“... an interesting slip early in A.S. Byatt’s new novel. It is 1895. A young working-class man, Philip Warren, has been adopted by a liberal upper-class family, the Wellwoods. At the Kentish country home of Olive and Humphry Wellwood, a glorious Midsummer Party is in preparation. Humphry is a banker (though he will soon switch to journalism), and Olive is a ...”

“... because the would-be biographer has just shot – presumably dead – the artist-narrator. Philip Larkin has similarly written a (fairly) friendly hate-poem to his future biographer, although himself so warmly opposed to what he sees as the inhumanity and self-conceit of Modernism as to make some critics read him as if his work were hardly art at ...”

“... sealed off from the family and I couldn’t imagine why they wanted to stay.Like Mr Bleaney in the Larkin poem.Very Mr Bleaney except that they tended to be young. There were one or two junior Army officers who lodged with us. They must have been attached to Catterick, the nearby Army barracks. There were some odd seedy Bleaneyish types who took a fancy to my ...”

“... designed, to be ‘asking for it’. Interventions of this kind seem to be less common now. Philip Larkin’s ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ was written in 1962 in response to posters advertising seaside resorts and holiday camps. The laughing girl kneeling on the beach in the poster described in this poem has, within a couple of weeks, become ...”

“... I was God.’ Once a god, always a god? And yet always a reviser. On other days he can sound like Philip Larkin. Were there two Lowells, or only one? Lowell employed the term ‘dual personality’, a term which belongs to literature, and which also belongs to 19th-century medicine. The meaning of the term has remained uncertain: but it is certain that ...”

“... they tell of how much sleep has been missed, but because they bring the next day nearer. As Philip Larkin, poet of limits, knew so well, sleep has the one big disadvantage that we wake up from it: ‘In time the curtain edges will grow light,’ he wrote in ‘Aubade’, bringing ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. For Tristan and ...”