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“... of this extraordinary novel until Naomi Lebowitz’s appeared in 2010 with the title Lucky Per. Paul Larkin’s translation is entitled A Fortunate Man, which was also used for the 2018 Danish film adaptation. The cultural context is gone, but the question remains: what does it mean to be lucky, happy, fortunate? Both a state-of-the-nation novel and ...”

“... In 1974, with High Windows about to appear, Larkin lamented in a letter that critics would have passed the word around – Donnez la côtelette à Larquin – give Larkin the chop. Of course he was wrong. The chorus of praise swelled higher than ever: with each slim volume the certainty and authority of the poems and their unique feel of personality left readers dazzled ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties” ...”

“... episcopal vowels– we’d drink retsina over lunch(its taste the faint tang of cricket batsas Larkin once told you)and later I’d recollectthat resiny taste of new artthe summery freedomand gurgly spluttery laughterof a boy from Castlederg or Lisburnwho crossed the Irish Seato invent himself as le bon Charlotfor the fun of the game and the storyBurmaPaul ...”

“... land of Audenish fantasy. A far cry from the crisp and sexy stuff he was learning to write with Larkin, then a junior librarian at Leicester. Amis was friendly and polite in a pleasant unselfconscious way: he seemed natural. Indeed, he was natural, and I think this natural Amis stayed with him all his life alongside the other one, the fantasy persona which ...”

“... 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....”

“... On 23 April 1977 Philip Larkin came to lunch at Barbara Pym’s cottage in Finstock, near Oxford. She and her sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit ...”

“... If he had been writing in Petersburg in 1910 or thereabouts Philip Larkin would probably have been an Acmeist. He would have been in protest, that is to say, against the portentousness of the Symbolists, like Blok and Bely, against their bogus pleasure in the idea of Apocalypse, and their bogus parade of the mysterious and the ‘unknowable ...”

“... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... Even Pindar, Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have ...”

“... 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 must! He’s ...”

“... seem politically ‘progressive’ to him. This is why he likes J.H. Prynne’s verse, but not Larkin’s, and why he writes enthusiastically about Rushdie but treats A Dance to the Music of Time as if it were just a handbook of toff sociology. He has opinions about artworks; but they are never aesthetic ones. He rarely treats poems and novels as if they ...”

“... In fact, they are inseparable: it hardly needed Tom Paulin to remind us that the subtext in Larkin, even when his subject was horses at grass, rarely strayed far from the political decline of England.’ Later, in a sudden frenzy, they claim that ‘Carol Ann Duffy’s work is written out of a conviction that poetry must get its hands dirty if it is to ...”

“... Chapter titles in Light, Air and Openness, Paul Overy’s new look at modern architecture between the wars, describe the dream that the style underwrote: ‘The City in the Country’, ‘The House of Health’, ‘Built into the Sun’ and so on.* In the recently restored De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, a rare early example of the international style in England, the Modernist spirit has been so well revived that if more of those whom I saw eating and sunning themselves had been young and bronzed, not old and white-haired, and if the pavilion was not still surrounded by the brick terraces you see in the earliest photographs, you would have guessed that the planner’s dream had been achieved ...”