“... standards), it does fascinatingly combine aspects of all the others – like Salinger, Paul Gascoigne refuses to meet Hamilton; it’s a book about difficulty of access, about a public figure withholding himself, about compromise (the white of Tottenham for the ‘peculiar blue vest’ of Lazio). Hamilton is even able to reveal that ‘Gazza is a ...”

“... It was to sell more than eighty thousand copies. The original idea was also to include Philip Larkin, a poet both Gunn and Hughes admired – in a letter to his sister Hughes called him ‘a very good gentle poet’. Larkin did not share the admiration. He wrote to Conquest about this idea for a Selected Poems of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of fiction. Sylvie is a young mother running a restaurant in France with her ambitious husband, Paul. She maintains a regular correspondence with George, her English father. When George dies, her sense of loss focuses on an irrational conviction that he must have posted a final letter, a communication that would have made sense of her diminished life. Her ...”

“... that displaced it. (A bit further on, there’s another essay which pairs Thomas with Philip Larkin, and clears both of them of the charge of giving in to nostalgia.) The neglect of Thomas and Frost, Edna Longley believes, goes hand-in-hand with the ‘overestimation’ of Pound and Eliot: but I don’t think it’s necessary to discard Pound and Eliot ...”

“... the Sunday Times and the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said ...”

“... seems, love, like happiness (which need not be but is sometimes part of love), writes white – as Larkin liked to quote Montherlant saying. The necessary detachment to compose love poetry is acquired only retrospectively (as with Hardy), or, if present in the heat of the moment, raises the suspicion of some coldness or lack of commitment on the part of the ...”

“... Hillier’s proposed trilogy and covers, roughly, the years 1933-58, the period when Betjeman, as Larkin put it, ‘became Betjeman’. The book is 736 pages long. Its predecessor, Young Betjeman, was 477 pages long. Depending on how the next volume pans out, the complete Life is going to be at least treble and possibly quadruple the size of your average ...”

“... of performance in which the poets give themselves away as much by their manner as their matter. In Larkin’s case in particular, we find the poet insisting on creating a public image which has been popularly accepted but which is projected at the expense of whole areas of his artistic personality. These performances will be influential on future criticism ...”

“... to conduct seminars to his groupies on the Dylan family’s garbage; fervent hagiographers like Paul Williams; politicians (Jimmy Carter was always quoting Dylan when on the stump), rock journalists, music historians, cultural historians, hard-core fanzine-types; and even an English international fast-bowler – Bob ‘Dylan’ Willis changed his name by ...”

“... about the articles he published elsewhere, or his scholarly books, lectures and essays. Defending Paul de Man’s rather slim academic publishing record – his first book, Blindness and Insight, appeared when he was 51 – Kermode says that in view of the density and strangeness of the work, and of its author’s fame: ‘It would take a very tough dean to ...”

“... in 1928 who studied English at Cambridge in the 1960s and who learned to argue with and against Paul de Man and Paul Ricoeur and Stanley Cavell during a long period as a professor at NYU. To describe this book as a product of that history is not to belittle it. From a wider historical perspective it’s what will make it ...”

“... American thing.Hugely so.You have written amusingly about what a small-time, English contender Larkin seemed to be, by comparison. Some of the same kind of ambition, but so discreetly felt and so discreetly concealed.You remember Lowell trying to cultivate Larkin, sending him a copy of The Dolphin or something? ...”

“... of life, and its continuous shadowing by What Might Be. It seems, in short, no accident that Paul Muldoon – whose brilliant new book Quoof gives support to most of the claims being made for ‘narrative poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived ...”

“... consistent contrarianism can produce odd outcomes. Surely Hitchens is not going to go the way of Paul Johnson, one of the leading attack-journalists (and New Statesman stalwarts) of a previous generation, now reduced to indiscriminate barking at all things ‘fashionable’, while intoning pas d’ennemis à droite? As it happens, I’ve been rereading ...”