Philip larkin

The English language has a curious feature, called the phrasal verb. It consists of a plain verb plus a preposition; to go up, to get over, to find out. They are quite often more vivid than their simple synonyms – to ascend, to recover, to discover. New ones are constantly being thought up; they are also totally irrational – get on with or get off with? Most serious writers spend a lot of time thinking about them. One day, the story goes, the poet Philip Larkin was challenged by his secretary at work. She had discovered a cache of pornography in his office cupboard. ‘But what’s it for?’ she asked.

Delayed, on Southern Rail Home From the Hill is a 1987 documentary by Molly Dineen about Hilary Hook, an elderly colonel who after a life in Kenya and the Far East retires to a nasty flat in England. Poor old Hilary has never had to prepare his own food and now, in his twilight years, he can’t even open a can of soup. He is horrified by Britain, its culture and bad weather. When I first saw Molly’s superb film as a young man it struck a chord. Some 35 years later, on a brief visit to England from Kenya, I can almost hear and feel myself becoming Hook. It’s

Don’t blame the banks? Sir: Kate Andrews struggles to disentangle the causes of the developing cost-of-living crisis (‘Cold truth’, 19 March), with the fallout from Brexit, Covid and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine all vying for responsibility. She forgets the financial crash of 2008, when a few irresponsible banks and building societies dragged this country into a financial abyss. The jury is still out on the effect that the Bank of England’s remedy of quantitative easing has since had on inflation and wealth inequality. We are all still paying the price for this disaster, as will be the next couple of generations. After 2008, successive governments paid for the bailout of

In matters of sex, Philip Larkin was late getting away. On his 23rd birthday, he wrote defeatedly to Kingsley Amis: ‘I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for parliament.’ His 2014 biographer, James Booth, adds that Larkin was ‘still effectively a virgin… [and] Amis was puzzled that his friend failed to follow through his pursuit of sexual satisfaction’. There is no join-the-dots explanation for what Larkin called the ‘sex-fear and auto-erotic fantasies’ that beset him all his life. But in the centenary of his birth, it’s time

In the introduction to an anthology of his jazz record reviews, the poet Philip Larkin imagines his readers. They’re not exactly full of the joys of spring. He describes them as ‘sullen fleshy inarticulate men… whose first coronary is coming like Christmas’. Loaded down with ‘commitments and obligations and necessary observances’ they’re drifting helplessly towards ‘the darkening avenues of age and incapacity’. Everything that once made life sweet has deserted them and their only solace is the memory of the music they once loved. I first read that passage 35 years ago and didn’t think it would apply to me one day. Admittedly, the men Larkin conjures up are more

‘Willie or bum?’ I said to Catriona on the motorway. Everything in my recent medical career has been introduced via the former: cameras, cutters, stents. I naturally assumed it would be the same choice of pathways for exploring and snipping off three pieces of my liver. At the wheel, Catriona laughed at my idiocy and explained where my liver was and that there was not a pathway from it to either of those entrances. ‘They’ll go straight in through the side with a needle,’ she said. ‘Ow,’ I said. While I undressed in front of her, the admissions nurse scanned my written forms. ‘Anglais? I only take cash,’ she said,

I am memorialised twice in my village church. Not in some premature lapidary way, but in the visitors’ book. The first time was with my toddler, when I wrote her name down. Some years later I showed her that scribbled evidence and inked us in again. There we were, here we are. I always sign these modest manuscripts, with their columns for date, name, address and comments, and I’m always touched by the commonplaces: ‘So peaceful.’ ‘Thank you for being open.’ ‘Beautiful.’ Sometimes the signatories are far from home; tourists who stumble in, or those searching out forebears. On a recent trip to Ludlow, in pursuit of A. E. Housman,

My 91-year-old father-in-law has always had a terror of hospitals. This dates from his time as a Royal Marine when, just after the second world war, he was infected with polio by a contaminated needle. The first he knew of it was when a visiting dignitary came on board ship and he was unable to lift his arm in salute. Ever since, he made it very clear that he doesn’t want to go to a hospital under any circumstances, ever. But last week he was admitted to A&E with a high temperature and I didn’t fret for one moment that he’d be alarmed. Why? He’s got late-stage dementia. He’s forgotten

I first came across Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be the Verse’ when I was 18 in the late 1970s. You know the one: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do…’ I was working as a volunteer in a care home for physically handicapped adults in Camden, north London. I had dropped out of school without doing my A levels. When I visited my parents over Easter, my father was angry about my newly acquired pierced ear and earrings: ‘What does it say about who you’re associating with? You’ve really upset your mother.’ Seething, I returned to London and conveyed to the