“... that is a spin-off – it isn’t what the essayist principally intended. By contrast, when Philip Larkin reviews in 1959 Iona and Peter Opie’s Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, one is distracted from the just and necessary points that Larkin has to make, by the elaboration or further definition of the ...”

“... us, it is natural that she should leave it out. It is relevant, however, to quote the opinion of Philip Larkin about poetry in wartime as it throws light on the weakness of much wartime prose. He certainly did not mean to comfort or console us either. He speaks harshly of poets whom we may have admired in our time: ‘A period which can laud the poetry ...”

“... dusted off or taken down. Nor did its unconvincing blank verse impress Raymond Mortimer or even Philip Larkin, who warned Murray his review would not be ‘a rave’. Others simply parodied Betjeman’s more familiar tum-ti-tum verses, which, as the Sunday Express showed, was all too easy: Have you read the latest Betjeman? But, my dear, you simply ...”

“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sometimes it issued in wry self-irony, sometimes in sentimental sadness – the quality that Philip Larkin was noting when he said that MacNeice might have written the lyrics to ‘These Foolish Things’ – but never in self-pity, and never in confession. From first to last, his favourite pronoun was ‘he’ not ‘I’ – the Self observed, but ...”

“... fiction, but in several passages Ricks nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to ...”

“... been but few occasions when the whole company of Angry Young Men was assembled. Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday ...”

“... innocence and respectability of later times. Certainly Housman was not one who boasted, like Philip Larkin, that ‘the whole of the ancient world, the whole of Classical and Biblical mythology’, meant very little to him. The plan of John Bayley’s book is not to set Housman’s work against any such wide background, nor indeed to indicate ...”

“... that when the former chairman of Faber, Charles Monteith, encountered the suggestion that one of Philip Larkin’s poems was indebted to Théophile Gautier, he was ‘incredulous’. To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was ‘ludicrous’. ‘He had fallen,’ Raine ...”

“... who preceded them. Now as then, they are questions which in the words not of Gellner but of Philip Larkin Bring the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the ...”

“... of Phena at News of Her Death’. It had previously come to mind at news of another death, Philip Larkin’s, because of his once pinpointing essentially the birth of his own art: the moment when he stopped condescending to Hardy’s. ‘As regards his verse I shared Lytton Strachey’s verdict that “the gloom is not even relieved by a little ...”

“... quadruplicated city life. Why are the people so happy here? Why aren’t they screaming, as Philip Larkin might say. For good measure – or for whatever measure we saw with the cyclists’ escape from disaster – one of the inhabitants of one of the flats turns out to be the man Hulot has been trying all day to see in his glassy office. Now he ...”

“... of white Tom   Shall float to Heaven – to Hardy’s ‘rather monotonously small follower Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s the merit of vulgarity and spleen? Many trees have been cut down to make the ...”

“... for the distorting power of what is, by any measure, the richest single source, the letters to Philip Larkin. Some 530 of these survive, almost half of which were printed in Leader’s edition, predominantly from the 1940s and 1950s, the period of their greatest intimacy. They wrote to amuse each other but also to outdo each other, especially in ...”