“... 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 ...”

“... anything that looks like being a success, in much the same way that Patrick Hamilton’s did. When Philip Roth was selling his millions, and explicit sex was all the rage, Updike competed with Couples, which failed by exaggerating and specialising his natural sense of things, in all the senses of that ancient and convenient word. Things and short stories go ...”

“... men sit and hear each other groan’ and so on), but it would have been more apt to have quoted Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, to which Roth on the subject of fear of not-being hasn’t got a lot to add (as who could?): the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And ...”

“... Britain’; there had been ‘nothing like it since Inigo Jones’. The great American modernist Philip Johnson praised its ‘distinction’ in the Architectural Review. Local people disliked it, possibly because, as the Smithsons thought, they were unsophisticated but without doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating ...”

“... episodes from the gravitational pull of a goal, contributes to that sense of pointlessness, of, in Larkin’s words, ‘what happened to happen’. The first part of On the Look-Out runs from 1964 to 1945. The opening sections evoke an ordered but quietly odd life. Sisson, then an Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Labour, is a kind of double agent, loyal both ...”

“... by virtue of merely being very good. Donald Davie’s Christian Verse is very good. It joins Philip Larkin’s Twentieth-Century Verse to make the most brilliantly interesting Oxford Books of recent years: two books to be read as books are read, and not merely consulted as the OED is consulted. The fact that both Davie and ...”

“... and we can’t wait to get to know you.’And take you for every penny we can.7 July. Run into Philip and Kersti French in M&S with Philip bent tight over his trolley and using it as a walker. I ask him how he is. ‘Dreadful’. ‘Anything specific?’ ‘Knees. Legs. Lungs. Kidneys … Shall I go on?’ The recital so ...”

“... best commentary on this aspect of Hitchcock’s films (and on a great deal else besides) may be Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, a poem about the specific, all-consuming fear aroused by the most general and unavoidable (that is to say, banal) of all conditions. This is the fear not so much of dying, as of death, of mortality. Waking at 4 a.m. to ...”

“... his own need to reassure his parents, much got left out. In a series of interviews Hecht did with Philip Hoy in 1999, however, published in the Waywiser Press series ‘Between the Lines’, Hecht had more to say about what he had witnessed at Flossenbürg in 1945: When we arrived, the SS personnel had, of course, fled. Prisoners were dying at the rate of ...”

“... Welcome to the world of post-modern politics. This scenario (or something like it) is laid out by Philip Bobbitt in the course of describing three possible futures for the world we now inhabit, one characterised by what Bobbitt calls the transition from a ‘nation-state’ to a ‘market-state’ model of politics and society. The nation-state is the model ...”

“... have ever been settled. Whether arranged alphabetically by first line, like The ‘Garland’ of Philip, or by subject and date, like Verse and Worse and The Stuffed Owl, the Anthology has always seemed less than the sum of its parts. Indeed its Byzantine title concedes a pleasing serendipity: anthoi, logia, ‘a gathering of flowers’. The Elizabethans may ...”

“... much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of ...”

“... might infect what comes after with their banality. In this sense Orton (and to some extent Larkin) is exceptional, Orton’s early diaries written with the same peculiar slant on the world as his mature writings.1957 was the year I should have come down from Oxford but didn’t and one thing I think reading this tosh is that if I hadn’t got a First ...”