'I'd almost forgotten I existed. Being selected has done wonders for me' May 11, 2008
Of Time and the City drifts through recent histories and memories, set to music including Faur; and Peggy Lee and poetry including TS Eliot, Shakespeare's sonnets and Philip Larkin. So, I wonder, what has changed about Liverpool. (Guardian Unlimited -- Film)
Book Review: Brian Hall's 'Fall of Frost' May 10, 2008
Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, Philip Larkin and other poets have cameos, though bunched together, ponderously, as a choral character named "The Younger Poet." We also encounter Nikita Khrushchev, the cold war's pre-eminent "old-stone savage armed," whose 1962 meeting with Frost provides the nearest thing to plot in Hall's book. It was a cordial meeting - Frost would have preferred it be called a summit - that Frost squandered by misquoting Khrushchev upon his return to the United States, claiming... (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Photographer's papers reveal image-conscious Larkin May 7, 2008
Philip Larkin, outside Hull University library ... Many of us hate looking at photographs of ourselves, but Philip Larkin seems to have particularly disliked the process. (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
Angelique Chrisafis talks to the mother of Michel Houellebecq: 'It was him that left me' May 7, 2008
Philip Larkin spoke for most writers when he said: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." But Houellebecq's disgust for his "old slut of a mother" goes far beyond that. When Ceccaldi abandoned him to his grandparents as a baby so she could go travelling across Africa with her husband, the rejection shaped his whole oeuvre. (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
Clive James asks'Does Amy Winehouse really have a duty to her sublime talent?' May 4, 2008
But perhaps a better ending would be what Philip Larkin said to the ghost of Sidney Bechet. "On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes". (BBC News -- UK)
Why we need dilemmas Apr 20, 2008
It's only a few years since the British poet Philip Larkin got the Naipaul treatment. It happened after his death instead of before, but there were similar calls for his books not to be read. (BBC News -- UK)
Joan Jackson Apr 18, 2008
"As Philip Larkin observed, Betjeman wept at Victorian ballads and roared at Edwardian comic songs; these imbue a poem of true passion: such apparatus is necessary before Betjeman "can say what he wishes to say - and yet, we reflect, Aldershot is a military town, and even if Betjeman was never a subaltern he did marry the daughter of a field marshal: the poem's feeling is genuine, even if the properties are fiction - yet even the properties have, perhaps, a kind of truth".First published in... (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
Book Review: Jonathan Coe's 'The Rain Before it Falls' Apr 12, 2008
It is a world that would not seem to be any kind of repository for beauty; yet Philip Larkin, for one, revealed its hidden wonder. At first it seems Coe wishes to do the same; here are "trees black and brittle against a gray sky, like charred bones; rough stone walls fuzzy with layers of gray moss; the fields, rising and falling in gentle undulations, English and undemonstrative, and gray as the snow-heavy sky itself." This is, however, an atypical passage, coming as it does before Rosamond's... (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Breaking the Bank in Las Vegas Apr 3, 2008
Poet Philip Larkin once said he would like to go to China if he could be home for dinner. Adelson and other makers of modern Las Vegas have obliged people like Larkin, sort of. (Townhall.com)
Quiet but not soft Mar 28, 2008
Her lyrics have a playfulness that can only come from a frequent reader and her song Tap At My Window is based on a poem by that most decidedly non-popular-music man, Philip Larkin. But there was something singleminded about her musical pursuit, and that can be said not just because she learnt to play four instruments and was performing in nondescript venues and dodgy rooms from the age of 15. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Scientists dig up the dirt on the creatures who invented sex Mar 24, 2008
Sexual intercourse began in 1963, the poet Philip Larkin famously wrote. He was out by only 570 million years. (The Herald)
Happy warrior, embittered pacifist Mar 18, 2008
Philip Larkin once remarked that the convictions Owen and Sassoon expressed in their poetry came to permeate the entire national consciousness. In many ways they still do. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Nobelist Stiglitz Tallies Iraq War's Outrageous Cost: Review Mar 4, 2008
As the poet Philip Larkin wrote in 1969, ``Next year we shall be living in a country / That brought its soldiers home for lack of money. Our children will not know it's a different country. (Bloomberg)
'My songs are not pretty' Feb 4, 2008
One track on it, Tap at My Window, is inspired by a Philip Larkin poem, which makes it all the more surprising that Marling - whose image-rich lyrics suggest a love of literature - failed her English GCSE. "I loved books," she says, "but I didn't love tearing apart a character. I like building a character.". She gets a lot from books; her favourite authors are Jane Austen and the Bront s. "They're always made out to be so sweetly romantic, but they're not - they're brutal. I love the way you can... (Guardian Unlimited)
'Electronic Poet': Florida Tech professor takes medium to high-tech level Jan 28, 2008
"Yet, despite these mind-bending pursuits that challenge conventional linear understanding, Skellings' poetry is immediately accessible and moving.He learned that, he says, at a writer's workshop at the University of Iowa.His teacher? Robert Frost."Be plain," is what he says Frost taught him.His favorite poets include Philip Larkin, William Stafford, Donald Justice and his friend, Yevgeny Yevtushenko."Poetry is very simply the best that has been said by people," he says. "It communicates more.... (Florida Today)
The curse of the unread Dec 30, 2007
Among those interviewed is Philip Larkin, expressing distaste for poetry readings. (I'm with him there: Poetry should be seen and not heard. (Boston Globe)
Book review: The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 2 Dec 27, 2007
(Refreshingly, the dour Philip Larkin complains about poets who explain their work: "It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife."). The interviews that shine get away from this. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Potpourri for the excrement artist? Dec 23, 2007
Naipaul dismissed the poetry of Philip Larkin and the novels of Anthony Powell in his new collection, A Writer's People, and went on to suggest that his own novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, was too long and difficult a book for Tony Blair to read. The increasingly loony-eyed Everett, trawling shallower waters, recently opined that Al Pacino is a "mad old freak," that George Clooney is "not the brightest spark on the boulevard" and that worship of celebrity culture heralds our doom. (Globe and Mail)
Library acquires Pinter archive Dec 12, 2007
Highlights of the archive include an affectionate run of letters from Samuel Beckett, letters and hand-written manuscripts revealing Pinter's close collaboration with director Joseph Losey, and an exchange of letters with poet Philip Larkin. The papers - together with material relating to the award of the Nobel Prize, cuttings books, and photographs - form one of the most significant post-War literary archives. (BBC News -- Entertainment)
Linda Hall: A literary life well lived Dec 6, 2007
In a Library Journal notice of the Paris Review Writers at Work series, a reviewer concluded with "[a] quibble: Does Elizabeth Hardwick really belong to this party?" The "great names in 20th-century literature" had been interviewed, including Philip Roth, Philip Larkin and Milan Kundera. Elizabeth Hardwick really belongs. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
'I was bored' Dec 6, 2007
And finally, Philip Larkin said, "Write the book you would most like to read, that no one else has written.". What are you working on. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Movie Review: 'The Savages': Real-life travails of the blissfully neurotic Nov 30, 2007
They mess you up, your mum and dad, Philip Larkin more or less wrote, which, though it provides steadfast inspiration for poets of all disciplines, has emerged as one of the banes of American independent cinema. At first glance, "The Savages," which had its premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival and opens in the United States and Europe throughout the winter and spring, looks like another one of those dreaded indie encounter sessions in which everyone cracks wise and weary on the... (International Herald Tribune)
An everyman's mystic Nov 28, 2007
When I studied English at Oxford University in the late 1970's I was aghast to find Blake, and his later fellow-mystic G.M. Hopkins, on the compulsory syllabus, at the expense of Tennyson, Browning, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin. If people want a new English national hero - or simply to raise the profile of a truly radical, intense, weird and fascinating English eccentric, who also wrote reams of gloriously over-the-top, never-imitated, lyrical poetry, they need look no further than the Victorian... (BBC News -- UK)
* [ HARDCOVER: UK ] Pen and glasses are mightier than sword for Queen Elizabeth Nov 4, 2007
She regrets all the opportunities she's missed to get to know writers she has met, like T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. And she regrets that she's come to reading so late in life and sets about making up for lost time. (Taipei Times, Taiwan -- World)
'More life than a wood-full of cats' Nov 3, 2007
What Philip Larkin thought when Hughes drew his horoscope for him isn't recorded - nor how he reacted on his death bed when Hughes sent him the phone number of a faith healer in Okehampton ("[there's] some sort of energy that fl ows from him and galvanises the patient's own auto-immune system"). The supernatural beliefs may sound wacky but the motives are benign. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Maiden Name by Philip Larkin Oct 2, 2007
Philip Larkin's apparently straightforward poem "Maiden Name" tackles some weighty issues, such as identity and the workings of language, with characteristic subtlety. Philip Larkin s poem Maiden Name explores the question of what a friend s name means when she marries and changes it. (Suite101.com)
Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin Oct 1, 2007
"Annus Mirabilis" deals with a similar topic to Philip Larkin's more famous poem "High Windows", and employs his customary irony and deft technique. The title of Philip Larkin s Annus Mirabilis means year of wonders in Latin. (Suite101.com)
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis Sep 23, 2007
There are also obvious comparisons to be drawn between Dixon s attitudes, and those expressed in the poetry of Philip Larkin. Larkin and Amis were friends at university, and their voluminous correspondence reveals their shared love for jazz and beer, and their instinctive suspicion for high culture , as well as flashes of the stylistic brilliance which would emerge more fully in their writing. (Suite101.com)
Bodleian's plan for £29m store divides Oxford Sep 18, 2007
The library also needs a proper conservation studio, where staff can work on recent acquisitions such as the 1960s letters between Philip Larkin and Monica Jones, which came to them like paper lace, shredded by bookworm and light. There are provisions for all of these in an even more expensive scheme to gut and rebuild the New Bodleian - but first they need to get the books out. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
A Reader’s Manifesto Aug 31, 2007
But when Vladimir Nabokov talks of midges "continuously darning the air in one spot," or the "square echo" of a car door slamming, I feel what Philip Larkin wanted readers of his poetry to feel: "Yes, I've never thought of it that way, but that's how it is." The pleasure that accompanies this sensation is almost addictive; for many, myself included, it's the most important reason to read both poetry and prose. Older fiction also serves to remind us of the power of unaffected English. (The Atlantic Online)
What’s our poet laureate’s name? Aug 26, 2007
Philip Larkin recalled that Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(Which was rather late for me)/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles first LP.. What has become of verses that rhyme. (Albany Democrat-Herald, OR)
M. SCOTT MORRIS: We've borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat Aug 11, 2007
- "Long lion days/Start with white haze./By midday you meet/A hammer of heat" - Philip Larkin. In Newspaper Writing 101, they strongly advise against writing about the weather because then everyone knows you lack the creative imagination to come up with anything original. (Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal)
Good night's sleep boosts long-term memory Aug 5, 2007
The vanity of the late Philip Larkin has come to light in a previously unseen letter to a photographer. August 5 2007. (Yahoo News -- Sleep and Sleep Disorders)
How Larkin put his image in soft focus Aug 5, 2007
The vanity of the late Philip Larkin has come to light in a previously unseen letter to a photographer. The witty correspondence with Fay Godwin from 1985 reveals how the womanising poet struggled to control his public image as he grew older. (Guardian Unlimited -- UK)
Harry Potter's dance to the music of time Jul 19, 2007
Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin. " "The Alexandria Quartet is best read after a tragic end to a great love affair, sipping a stiff vodka and listening to the waves crashing on a distant shore - fantastic stories, and of course you also get to discover Cavafy" [Offensive? Unsuitable? ] xtrapnel Comment No. Sheffield/gbr There's strong evidence in the character of Horace Slughorn (who appears in Harry Potter books 6 and 7) that JK herself is a "Dance. (Guardian Unlimited)
Q&A: curriculum reform Jul 12, 2007
The issue explained: Secondary school curriculum reform. Donald MacLeod looks at what 11 to 14-year-old pupils can expect to learn under the latest reforms to the secondary school curriculum. (Guardian Unlimited -- UK)
The soap opera at No.10 Jul 11, 2007
Campbell would no doubt say that, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, it's the media that "f---ed you up". But his diaries show it was the psychological flaws in the government he helped create that did more damage. (Sydney Morning Herald -- World)
Eagleton: Only Pinter Remains Jul 9, 2007
Philip Larkin, the period's unofficial poet laureate, was a racist who wrote of stringing up strikers. Most of the Angry Young Men of the 50s metamorphosed into Dyspeptic Old Buffers. (Zmag.org)
Take a man like Amis -- please Jul 8, 2007
("I refer," he wrote to Philip Larkin, "to the anonymous, crass, purblind, infantile, featureless HEAP OF GANGRENED ELEPHANT'S SPUT UM, 'Barewolf.' " ) Aggression, as Leader points out, was an essential ingredient in this writer's makeup. After an education, much dissected and scrutinized here, in London and later outside it because of the war, Amis went up to Oxford, though his studies there were interrupted by three years of fairly hapless military service. (Boston Globe)
Our own review Jun 27, 2007
It would be like something out of Philip Larkin, if only it wasn't true. . (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Simon's hits set arrives today Jun 26, 2007
" "The poet Philip Larkin didn't write in the last decade of his life. He said, 'The muse abandoned me. (USA Today)
The paternal instinct Jun 16, 2007
The remark reminds me of a poem in which Philip Larkin looks pityingly at a group of young mothers: "Something is pushing them,/To the side of their own lives." But rather than feeling marginalised, homedads tend to describe their experience as character-building and talk of the "transferable skills" they're acquiring at the highchair. Whether prospective employers see it that way is more doubtful. (Guardian Unlimited)
The Life of Kingsley Amis Jun 12, 2007
Letters, particularly to Philip Larkin in which Leader says Amis was "wholly trusting and frank" (not to mention jocularly revolting), not only display a penchant for exaggeration and malice, but also reveal his fears and phobias. Page 1. (Christian Science Monitor)
Obituary: Michael Hamburger Jun 11, 2007
Poetry had already become Michael's preferred artistic medium by this stage, and he was fortunate to be up at Oxford at the same time as other powerful young voices, such as Philip Larkin, John Heath-Stubbs (obituary, 29 December 2006) and Michael Meyer. One of his first forays into translating involved Baudelaire (Twenty Prose Poems, 1946). (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Review: The Life of Kingsley Amis Jun 2, 2007
") In any case, Amis's American comeback has yet to materialize. In the course of preparing this review, I made a fairly thorough search of bookstores in New York (and a few other places as well), and what I found was pretty much limited to "Lucky Jim," a slender Penguin paperback squeezed against an imposing row of volumes by Kingsley's younger son, Martin. (The exception was a small used-book store on the Upper West Side, where I found a cache of battered Penguins and Signets that seemed to... (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Think of England May 19, 2007
When Philip Larkin, writing lines on his girlfriend's photo album, said that photography is "as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing", this was the paradox he tried to pin down - that on the one hand photos seem immediate and "empirically true", but on the other they commemorate "just the past". Those flowers, that gate, These misty parks and motors, lacerate Simply by being over; you Contract my heart by looking out of date. (Guardian Unlimited)
Morrissey - so much to answer for May 7, 2007
With Marr as his musical director, Morrisey elevated a certain kind of poetic provincialism - the provincialism of Philip Larkin or Alan Bennett - to a pop art form. In doing so, as the writer Will Self, a longtime Smiths fan, points out: 'Morrissey freed himself to be a national artist in a way that a London pop star could never be. (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
Single minded Apr 29, 2007
Philip Larkin, in his poem "Dockery and Son", written in 1963 when he was 41, raised a question that would also preoccupy Henry James in his 40s, the question of being single and childless. In "Dockery and Son", the poet discovers that Dockery, "that withdrawn / High-collared public schoolboy", who was junior to him at college, must have had a son when aged 19 or 20. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
In fine form Apr 25, 2007
I could imagine a youthful Philip Larkin writing 'Love is Growing. The juxtaposition of youth and decay, love and cancer, might have appealed to him. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
It's just funny business as usual in the 'End' Mar 20, 2007
By David Daley, Special for USA TODAY The British poet Philip Larkin once wrote: "At 31, when some are rich/And others dead/I, being neither, have a job instead.". It's the kind of laconic, ironic observation that would be appreciated today by fans of the NBC series The Office or the film Office Space. (USA Today -- Life)
- Geoffrey Wheatcroft Mar 20, 2007
There was a wonderful moment once when Philip Larkin was talking to an interviewer about his career. He had begun to work as a librarian, he said, because he had to get a job "when I left Oxford during the first world war. Oh Christ, I mean the second world war." And to younger readers who snigger at that, I say, just you wait. (Guardian Unlimited)
When English eyes are smiling Mar 11, 2007
In the early 1950s, Philip Larkin, who had left England to work as a librarian in Belfast, was mistaken for an Irish poet by an editor who used his poetry as an example of the "rootedness" of Irish writing. Larkin himself felt anything but rooted in Ireland. (International Herald Tribune -- Ed/Op)
Authors and critics pick their favourites Feb 27, 2007
AE Housman, Hardy and Philip Larkin - three lugubrious old souls - are my greatest friends. Housman especially has meant more to me than anybody else, more even than Homer. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
To Russia, but not with love Feb 27, 2007
Enter the city, then press Submit. Visit the to get the latest temperatures. (Globe and Mail)
Perfect Pitch Feb 26, 2007
No wonder Philip Larkin considered him "a master of language.". In his profiles of jazz people Balliett was also an exquisite portraitist. (Boston Globe)
- Roy Hattersley Feb 26, 2007
Philip Larkin, on the other hand, was easy to understand and therefore a pleasure to read ... My last meeting with Philip Larkin was in the (now defunct) French Club in St James's. (Guardian Unlimited)
New windows into a mischievous mind Feb 17, 2007
" In creating church windows of butterfly wings, he seeks to examine the historical relationship of science and religion through art, further strengthening that perceived bond by giving each work two titles: one a direct reference to the religious iconography on which it is based, the other taken from "High Windows," a collection of poems by English poet Philip Larkin that was published in 1974 and questions religious faith. "Scientists are trying to make sense of the world; religion does that,... (Los Angeles Times)
Duke Ellington: Feb 15, 2007
I won't waste time trying to be funny about John Coltrane, because Philip Larkin has already done it, lavishing all his comic invention on the task of conveying his authentic rage. (For those who have never read Larkin's All What Jazz, incidentally, the references to Coltrane are the ideal way in to the burning center of Larkin's critical vision. (Slate)
A devotion that waxes and wanes Feb 13, 2007
Meanwhile, poets writing about love, such as Louis MacNeice and, later, Philip Larkin, absorbed Eliot's "vision of the alienation of modern society", says McInerney, "but were able to use the fragments of that world - cigarettes touched with the crimson of a woman's lipstick, for example - as a source of inspiration at once contemporary and transcendent. "When MacNeice writes, in Mayfly, 'I want always to be near your breasts', the line's power derives from the understanding that the desire for... (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Whitney Balliett, jazz scribe for New Yorker Feb 9, 2007
Jazz critic and poet Philip Larkin described Mr. Balliett as "a writer who brings jazz journalism to the verge of poetry." Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, called him "the greatest prose stylist to ever apply his writing skills to jazz.". Mr. Balliett began writing a regular jazz column for The New Yorker in 1957. (Boston Globe)
Whitney Balliett Feb 5, 2007
He wrote for this magazine for almost fifty years, mostly about jazz, and what he wrote was so good that Philip Larkin, not an easy man to please about either jazz or poetry, called him a master of language, while, years later, the young Nicholson Baker still referred to him, in a wondering aside, as a tireless prodigy. Whitney was about as pure a stylist as anyone who has written American English, yet his sentences were almost always about someone else s art; that s what gave his writing its... (New Yorker)
Whitney Balliett, 80; longtime New Yorker jazz writer Feb 3, 2007
Jazz critic and poet Philip Larkin described Balliett as "a writer who brings jazz journalism to the verge of poetry.". One of Balliett's most-anthologized pieces was his 1962 profile of clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, titled "Even His Feet Look Sad.". (Los Angeles Times)
The French know where 007 acquired his savoir-faire Jan 19, 2007
Umberto Eco, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin have all written seriously about Bond, but the French intelligentsia has been slow in embracing global popular culture. Fleming, a French speaker whose Bond novels were translated into French decades ago, never has been considered a first-rate novelist. (International Herald Tribune)
A regiment of women, some excellent, some annoying Jan 15, 2007
In the Times Literary Supplement of Jan. 21, 1977, both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil named Pym "the most underrated novelist of the century," and suddenly her published novels were back in print, and those that had been rejected by countless publishers were accepted and greeted with praise. Pym's neglect is so in keeping with the tenor of her novels that it almost seems of a piece with them, for her great topic is the shabby deal the world hands a certain kind of woman: the unmarried woman... (Boston Globe)
