“... cosmos, an integral factor in a prolonged, and possibly insoluble, post-colonial schizophrenia? Paul Johnson’s book is lively, well-informed and often provocative; his standpoint allows little space for nuances. His ‘crucial developments’ are the troubles themselves; the ‘shared experiences’ (one thinks of those thousands of Irishmen who ...”

“... and slipper’d pantaloon, and the ‘last scene of all’, second childishness. To which Philip Larkin has appended a later last scene: ‘... and then the only end of age.’ If the old are wealthy they will be allowed to be wise, or at all events handled with circumspection. If they are poor, they may find, mutatis mutandis, that the family outing to the ...”

“... proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben Nicholson, Betjeman and all the stuff to do ...”

“... 1950s the Movement poets sought to show that a plain tongue could be civilised and elegant, but in Larkin genteel forms are increasingly played off against the demotic: fuck, balls, cock, cunt – this is Larkin’s equivalent of dialect. Nowadays Peter Reading is offering something similar, inserting into a great variety of ...”

“... come the writer nobs: Jack Kerouac, ‘babbling on with the fluency of a jammed beer-tap’, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose ‘demand that intellectuals should “integrate with the masses” seems even more unreal than it would otherwise, coming from a man who could not bear to face an orange’. It does seem a bit doubtful that plain bread-earners share these ...”

“... by Hierarchies of cuisine and literacy. The photograph-poem has become an important sub-genre. Larkin, Hughes, Porter and others have practised it. There’s a sense in which the photograph does part of the poet’s work for him, freezing a charged but vanishing moment so that nuances of mood or relationship, by definition volatile, become permanently ...”

“... Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes ...”

“... to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. Philip Larkin (sans bicycle clips) with a Byronic makeover. Larkin reimagined by Barbara Cartland, all scowls and flashing coattails, piercing glances. This wholesome, outdoorsy Englishness, bracing weather and privatised mayhem ...”

“... narration), is a much-abused term. At one pole it can legitimately cover some of the fictions that Paul Muldoon conjures from phrase and symbol. But Carver, although his narratives are not necessarily transparent, sets out from the other pole, from event. And the short story has nurtured (or did it draw on?) the instinct that marks a real poet: where to begin ...”

“... the enquiry to focus on each of these acquaintances in turn. The significant victim is Sir Paul Berowne, whose recent resignation of his ministerial post may, or may not, be due to a mystical experience undergone by him in a striking-looking church called St Matthew’s, on the banks of the Grand Union Canal. The circumstances of the baronet’s life ...”

“... with a vision of poetry that was opposed to the limited horizons of the Movement poets like Larkin and Amis and their followers, open to the influence of Europeans, especially the Surrealists and Paul Celan, and to the work of Americans such as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer or Frank O’Hara and the New York ...”

“... most extended and schematic exorcism of history and mythology. The poem is – to borrow Paul Zweig’s phrase for ‘Song of Myself’ – a ‘therapeutic epic’. Each of its main characters represents an unfortunate aspect of the West Indian inheritance which, as the poem progresses, is either cured or comfortably accommodated. Philoctete, for ...”

“... cold-hearted, conflicted and calculating man. The shock produced is akin to the revelations about Paul de Man or Philip Larkin. Lee Siegel is horrified by the racism in Shadows, by the ‘crude, alienated caricatures’ of blacks, gentiles and vulgar Miami Jews who ‘make Goodbye, Columbus look like “World of Our ...”

“... envisioned by Emerson, who ‘re-attaches things to Nature and the whole’, to Peter Stillman, in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, crazedly attempting to re-create prelapsarian speech. Olson, it is often pointed out, is the first poet to have described himself as ‘Post-Modern’. That was in 1952. Five years before that he published his first book, Call Me ...”

“... Quant’s Bazaar, which opened in the King’s Road in 1955. The turning point was 1963, the year Paul McCartney went to Nancy Spain’s New Year’s Eve party and from which Larkin dated the beginning of the 1960s. Cooke agrees that it was the effective end of the 1950s. From that point it was not only sexual intercourse ...”