Philip Larkin in Oxford, 1943Philip Larkin opens A Girl in Winter with a chapter, three paragraphs long, in which he describes England during World War II, suffering through a stormy winter, its people trying to carry on daily life through numbness and deprivation:[The snow] lay in ditches and in...
'Jill' by Philip Larkin is a frustratingly erratic novel. It starts promisingly, then dips considerably before rallying in its final section. I came near to giving up on it during the very dull and tedious middle part of the story. I persevered with it, and I'm glad that I did. I was left wit...
This week I read Philip Larkin's fifth collection of poems, 'The Whitsun Weddings' (1964).Usually when I say 'read' I mean read once, from cover to cover (apart from the books I abandon). And when I say 'read' a book of poems, usually I mean read each poem once (well- let's be honest, in an antho...