Spectator competition winners: Henry James and other well-known writers look for love online

In Competition No. 3302, you were invited to compose a dating app profile for a writer of your choice.

To mark the centenary last year of Philip Larkin’s birth, the poet Imtiaz Dharker wrote ‘Swiping left on Larkin’ in which she imagined how, given his complicated relationship with intimacy, the poet would present himself on such an app. This led me to wonder how other writers might set themselves apart in the online dating scrum.

A shout-out to Paul A. Freeman’s Kipling (‘If you can eat steak rare when all about you/ Are ordering their sirloins darkly singed…’)’ and Max Ross’s Wordsworth (‘Sadly I wander lonely as a cloud/ And so I seek some kind companionship…’). Nick MacKinnon, Sue Pickard, Paul D. Amer and Philip Roe also caught my eye, but the winners earn £30.

That affairs of the heart may call on wellsprings of spontaneous emotion is not to be doubted. Ardour has its place.