“... six years I lived in her home town of Oxford. She had studied English at St Anne’s College while Larkin and Amis were also undergraduates in the 1940s; unlike them, she had stayed on in the town. I don’t remember which poems she read; I recall instead the gestures she didn’t make, her self-effacement. In the early 1980s, ...”

“... was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s heart-warming dexterity (feelingful as well as formal) below, for instance, 18 solid unpunctuated pages of pornographic daydream: Kenneth Bernard’s ‘The Baboon in the Night ...”

“... car manufacturers. He was also the author of a novel, Man in White (1986), about the life of St Paul, with whom he liked to compare himself: ‘Also interesting, for me at least,’ he writes in Cash (1997), ‘were the parallels between Paul and myself. He went out to conquer the world in the name of Jesus Christ; we in ...”

“... of thirty or forty poems every three or four years; some are more industrious than even that. Paul Durcan’s Going home to Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to read Kafka but without success. For the same reason she asked at the library for something on Larkin but seeing his photograph gave the book straight back: ‘He looked too much like Sergeant Bilko.’28 January. I switch on the Antiques Roadshow where someone is showing an expert a drawing by E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh. It’s a ...”

“... Artaud, you become dependent on the past if only because you need to have it around to reject. As Paul de Man observed in his subtle essay ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, ‘the more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.’* What blurs these continuities is the fact that in the natural ...”

“... been present to me for decades but which I have never read. Chief among them until recently was Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste.Would it have made a difference to read it earlier? I have always had a taste for not-quite-novels, but I suspect this would always have been too much of a not-quite-a-not-quite-novel for me: a strange, pert, bossy little fuck-you ...”

“... Everybody knows – Paul Muldoon said it on the radio recently – that writing poetry can only get harder the more you keep at it. Against that is the belief, or perhaps the determination, that it shouldn’t. That instead of the diminishing returns, spending twice the time saying half as much twice as cumbrously/flashily/winsomely, one should use craft and expertise to overthrow the stiflement and self-importance of craft and expertise – to be as uninhibited and fresh and airy as a beginner ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously ...”

“... the way in which great art creates its own rules and vision. Bayley writes approvingly of Paul Celan’s poems, which create their own ‘absolute vision’, and of the way Auden’s work is a magic that ‘completely enchants and dispossesses what it celebrates’. The great work of art, in Bayley’s ideal, seems to relate to the world as the great ...”

“... The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto keep wicket at Lord’s.Like Station Island, though for ...”

“... to such cadences is at times exhilaratingly effective, particularly in its wildcat juxtapositions (Larkin and Shakespeare, Auden and Ralegh, Walcott and Langland).Again, though, the high-flown terms used to describe lyric action (‘the purely poetic fidelity of the poet to all words in their pristine being’) suggest that the ground has been made safe by a ...”

“... yes? – or to its calculation, its finely calibrated scales, that what survives of it is (pace Larkin) nothing. That nothing finally preponderates, no sensation remains, no vision, no synthesis, no understanding. Amis has made everything somehow ‘come out even’: the historical substrates of the book (Wannsee, El Alamein, Stalingrad, Nuremberg, all ...”

“... darnel and the beer … the homesickness and bed-sickness, the yearning for masculine death’. Larkin in 1979 noted ‘ploughing, enlisting, betrothals and betrayals and hangings’. No other poet has been so itemised, and Parker’s angle widens dramatically to include ‘love and loss; youth and death; friendship and betrayal; crime and punishment; the ...”