“... Wilfred Owen (‘Tennyson was a great child: so should I have been but for Beaumont-Hamel’) and Philip Larkin took for granted the legend of the pampered and querulous baby with the august title. Even the title was not quite what it seemed, as Ann Thwaite’s close detective work is able to show. Tennyson did not want it, and there is no doubt that in ...”

“... And yet Connolly’s reputation is probably as high as it has ever been. Nice one, to be sure. Philip Larkin once wrote that Connolly was ‘at his best when able to assimilate his subject into the scenario of his own temperament’. But for connolly such assimilation was compulsive. Almost everything he wrote was touched with woe-begone ...”

“... an hour before daybreak – are unsurpassable.In his Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse, Philip Larkin included seven of Sassoon’s poems; only Yeats and Hardy had significantly more. True, Larkin’s anthology was denounced by Donald Davie and others as a counterblast against Modernism. But it can’t be ...”

“... failed in some way, have proved ‘minor’, not ‘major’. The first three, for instance, are Philip Henry Gosse (the Father of Father and Son), who had his work for ever upstaged by The Origin of Species; John Churton Collins, a good journalist and scholar for ever cruelly ‘placed’ by one harsh Tennysonian snub; and Eliza Lynn Lynton, an early ...”

“... Movement’ itself – the incisively intelligent ‘academic-administrative’ verses of Larkin, Wain and Enright – could not help endorsing the most negative feedback of all – English gentility, the ‘decency and other social totems’ that ‘muddle through’. New poetry had to have ‘a new seriousness; the new poet must face the full range ...”

“... the same poem twice. A New Path to the Waterfall ‘bites hard’, reinstating feeling in a manner Philip Larkin might have approved. However, the poems are not only not artless: they unite poetry and epistemology more deeply and functionally than does, for instance, John Ashbery. When Carver in ‘Summer Fog’ imagines grieving for his wife, instead of ...”

“... and anyway, according to Anthony Burgess, ‘he can’t compare as a poet with, say, people like Philip Larkin or even Adrian Mitchell.’ I know I ought to argue with these people. I know I ought to explain, patiently, that Dylan is the practitioner of an original art which does not respond to the traditional categories of analysis; that his skills of ...”

“... failing to make the motive fit the crime, and for letting obfuscation get out of hand (as Philip Larkin remarked in an Observer review, it’s possible to finish a Mitchell novel without grasping the identity of the victim, let alone that of the murderer). Sometimes her plots run away with her – though not in either of the current reissues, and ...”

“... Sex began in academia a decade later than it did for Philip Larkin. From the rise of the women’s movement to the postmodern cult of the perverse, few themes have been more persistent in literature departments than sexuality. For most people, writing about multiple orgasms is known as pornography; in academia, it can win you a chair ...”

“... half of the book can compare with early pieces like ‘Photograph of Haymaker, 1890’ – which Philip Larkin included in his Oxford anthology of 20th-century verse – or ‘Chrysanthemums’. Chrysanthemums – like courtiers in a dying kingdom, still fantastic in bronze or golden ruff, with hanging sleeves of ragged green, still aping fertility’s ...”

“... 7, bound for pre-war sun and the blue Mediterranean. But the nostalgic impulse was the same. Philip Larkin once told Connolly at a party, in a burst of shy alcoholic confidence, that The Unquiet Grave had ‘made’ him. It certainly inspired him. Gavin Ewart described it as ‘the Great Missing War Poem of World War Two’. Perhaps Logan Pearsall ...”

“... Literary History (2004) seemed to rate Prynne’s work above that of the ‘national monument’ Philip Larkin, John Carey reliably set up the easy symbolic row in the Sunday Times; the other papers, and the Today programme, pitched in predictably. Yet the result, interestingly and perversely, was to establish Prynne as the most significant alternative ...”

“... dressing-up. His friends and collaborators in this endeavour were Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and the three of them shared both a cheeky undergraduate misogyny, manifest in Conquest and Amis’s spoof, The Egyptologists, and a liking for pornography memorably documented in Andrew Motion’s 1994 biography of ...”

“... with Keith doing his best, as he confesses, to ‘ponce off the spirit of the times’. Philip Larkin – the usual – is quoted on the matter; there’s a bouncy riff about ‘girls acting like boys’ being ‘in the air’, and another about all the ‘cool pants’ a chick has to buy if she hopes to carry things off. Keith and his friends ...”

“... one of those, like Spark, for whom the fact of death gives life its shape and meaning or, as for Philip Larkin, its appalling pointlessness. Although she suggests that there is something in the parallel between literary and religious narrative she is not much interested in the idea of ritual as a way of externalising emotional and psychological ...”