“... the end of the performance, I was in tears (and so, incidentally, was my companion that afternoon, Philip Larkin, who admired her poems but who had, I think, never met her). The ‘hey-ho’ was in fact part of the tears. One merit of Frances Spalding’s excellent critical biography is that it helps to restore to Stevie Smith her dignity. Her earlier ...”

“... that Ezra Pound, let alone William Carlos Williams, had ever existed. Who now are the Old Masters? Larkin, of course; early Auden; Hardy; Tennyson; Thomas Hood (in a certain quarter); Byron and Shelley at their most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians....”

“... as reassurance, as equipment for living, almost as the Brownings once circulated, or even as Philip Larkin circulates ...”

“... expands to take in Hardy and Mansfield, some oddly straightforward passages from the letters of Philip Larkin or the conundrum that is Marianne Moore (and her mother). Nabokov puts in an appearance, but only to have his dictum ‘My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural ...”

“... writing, the thing that can be learnt on the campus, ‘the consequences’, as Philip Larkin put it, ‘of a cunning merger between poet, literary critic, and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable)’. Gay Clifford was an academic, and by all accounts a brilliant and effective one, a lecturer in English at ...”

“... nothing like these girls, and their talk and conduct might have surprised, even pleased the young Philip Larkin. Pregnancy and pornography, drink and cigarettes, always including Silk Cut, foul and blasphemous language, all seem to pass virtually unnoticed by their teacher, Sister Condron, known as Sister Condom, whose main concern is with their ...”

“... was perpendicular or worse to the real meaning of life, a long march towards, as the poet Philip Larkin puts it, ‘the solving emptiness/that lies just under all we do’.Ben decided to drop science and take his existential questions to the creative writing programme at NYU. He appointed himself to tell his cousin’s story. The result of these ...”

“... His work is very claustrophobic to me. And I have a book in my coat pocket – a book of poems by Philip Larkin, and my God, Larkin is dark – isn’t he? But he writes with such wonderful finesse. KB: The other thing that the critics like to talk about is failure of communication as a theme. I felt that although the ...”

“... months, with the diary unreadable (and illegible). Blame the anaesthetic.4 July. A letter from the Philip Larkin Society, reminding me that I’m an honorary vice-president, which I was unaware of. I’ve never been an enthusiastic member, partly because Larkin wasn’t particularly keen on my stuff or keen on my being ...”

“... and I shan’t attempt to cover it. I want merely to offer some comment on three poets – Eliot, Larkin and Ashbery – who may all be said to throw different kinds of light on the phenomenon of Anglo-American culture. First, some definitions: what, for instance, does it mean to be ‘American’ in this sense? Over the last century, American writers have ...”

“... Yet the plaintive voice from the Delta was as much a part of the Sixties as Jimi Hendrix. In 1962 Philip Larkin, who cannot have enjoyed the rawness, the deplorable lack of howdy-doody, in Robert Johnson, deferred (unconvincingly) to a ‘fine’ issue of his songs. In 1966, the year Hendrix recorded his first hit single ‘Hey Joe’, Columbia/CBS ...”

“... his lean 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 ...”

“... he began to modify many of his general views, one of them being the concept of chastity. As Philip Larkin has told us, ‘Sexual intercourse began/ in nineteen sixty-three’ and K had changed with the times: in fact, he changed much more briskly that they did. By the end of the Sixties he had formulated his new ideas and was preaching what he had ...”

“... to which the testimony of famous alumni has contributed. Guardian readers have now been told that Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis called their Old English texts ‘ape’s bum-fodder’. But if these readers get no further than the preface to the Companion, they will see what another Oxford wit, W.H. Auden, said of the same material: ‘I was ...”

“... writing took a quantum leap. Great Granny Webster was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 (Philip Larkin nixed it because he said it wasn’t fiction). There, too, matriarchal relations are haunted by a phantom man – in this case a father – but the narrator is all eye and ear, the better to capture the indelible characters of Granny Webster ...”