“... can now only be done very artificially, when it constitutes a way of life summed up at the end of Philip Larkin’s sardonic poem as ‘reprehensibly perfect’. The natural thing today is to travel as if sitting in a room, an aeroplane or a car. Instant arrival leaves us sitting in another room, waiting for more drops, sprightly or otherwise, from the ...”

“... And if you quote from memory, get it right. When Andrew Motion, no hero to Amis, says that Larkin’s anthology was meant to promote ‘the taste by which he wished to be relished’ he is adapting a remark of Wordsworth’s – ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is ...”

“... but some English readers haven’t been willing to let the question of Auden pass so genially. Philip Larkin’s review of Homage to Clio is the document to read, when this response to Auden is in question.Larkin’s view was – and still is, I suppose – that nothing Auden wrote after 1939 added to his ...”

“... Yeats, he must have been aware of the kind of criticism he would encounter. ‘At one stroke,’ Philip Larkin wrote, ‘he lost his key subject and emotion – Europe and the fear of war – and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns.’ Responding to Auden’s death in 1973, Anthony Powell was less circumspect: ‘No ...”

“... is suicide, or revenge, or any other definite topic. There is a certain relevance in a line from a Philip Larkin poem. ‘Vers de Société’: ‘Only the young can be alone freely.’ Only the young can so detachedly if tormentedly survey the prospect of adult existence as to be lieve that they have the option ‘To be or not to be’; the adult, with ...”

“... every line, whether mentioned or not, lies imminent danger and disruption.’ He quotes Philip Larkin’s comment in his review of Wilfred Owen’s Collected Poems in 1963: ‘A “war poet” is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust on him,’ and this certainly applies to ...”

“... is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, famous for introducing the term ‘International Style’, assumed, in Johnson’s phrase, that Wright was ‘the greatest American architect of ...”

“... Here’s a novella of slightly over 30,000 very plain words – Philip Roth’s shortest book since The Prague Orgy – structurally straightforward, winnowed of syntactical excitement, sterilised of jokes, rhythmically muted, baldly plotted, low on confrontation, low on tension, low on brilliancies and generally low all round ...”

“... the poem read as being about what it proclaims as its subject: Alexander the Great remembering Philip of Macedon.’ The middle stanza of ‘From an Asian Tent’ reads: You held me once before the army’s eyes; During their endless shout, I tired and slid Down past your forearms to the cold surprise Your plated shoulder made between my thighs. This ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or disappointment are not far away. The mood of these scenes is often curiously similar to that of Philip Larkin’s novels from two decades before, with their mingling of beery male intimacy, social unease and sexual anxiety. Jill Has Sex, with Metafiction (the comma is here, as always, important) might sum up the bad side of B.S. Johnson’s work from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be misled by his polemic into thinking of him as a reactionary determined to take mentors such as Larkin and Amis au pied de la lettre and never to give vent to an obscure or pretentious line. In general, James’s poetry does not much resemble that of the poets he declares his allegiance to: his temperament is different from theirs. He is more a latterday ...”

“... chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less ...”

“... never the wisest course of action, much less where the author of Briggflatts is concerned.* Philip Larkin’s post-biography/Selected Letters reputational woes are the exception that proves the rule for the modern poet: pass under the biographer’s yoke or enjoy your precious hermit kingdom, but don’t expect to do both. Or if you do expect ...”