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Spruce

John Bayley, 2 June 1988

A.E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Allen Lane, 528 pp., £18.95, April 1988, 0 7139 9009 0
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... where it relates specifically to the personality of the poet, always has a teasing quality. Philip Larkin, who admired Housman officially and also less openly, had many of the same characteristics. Housman can be brutally exclamatory and immediate, though always poised. When the bells justle in the tower       The hollow night amid, Then on my tongue ...

Costa del Pym

Nicholas Spice, 4 July 1985

Crampton Hodnet 
by Barbara Pym.
Macmillan, 216 pp., £8.95, June 1985, 0 333 39129 2
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Foreign Land 
by Jonathan Raban.
Harvill, 352 pp., £9.50, June 1985, 0 00 222918 8
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Black Marina 
by Emma Tennant.
Faber, 157 pp., £8.95, June 1985, 9780571134670
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... in English literature – for example, in the poetry of Hardy, Stevie Smith and especially Philip Larkin: Only a numbness registered the shock Of finding out how much had gone of life, How widely from the others. It may be that England is now becoming a cheap and nasty place, but Raban allows us no consolation in nostalgia. Emma Tennant is less bitter, more ...

Snail Slow

Colm Tóibín: Letters to John McGahern, 27 January 2022

The Letters of John McGahern 
edited by Frank Shovlin.
Faber, 851 pp., £30, September 2021, 978 0 571 32666 2
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... enthusiasm for banning books was waning by the time The Dark appeared, novels by Edna O’Brien, Maurice Leitch, Brian Moore and J.P. Donleavy were banned in the same period, as was Catch 22. (Ulysses, oddly enough, never was. And while the original Irish version of Brian Merriman’s 18th-century poem ‘The Midnight Court’ was freely in ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... George Fenton tells me of a memorial service he’s been to at St Marylebone Parish Church for Maurice Murphy, the principal trumpet of the LSO, who did the opening trumpet solo in the music for Star Wars. The service due to kick off at 11.30, George arrives with ten minutes to spare only to find the church already full, the congregation seated, silent and ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... might infect what comes after with their banality. In this sense Orton (and to some extent Larkin) is exceptional, Orton’s early diaries written with the same peculiar slant on the world as his mature writings.1957 was the year I should have come down from Oxford but didn’t and one thing I think reading this tosh is that if I hadn’t got a First ...

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