long-winded, inessential man she'd go for; if she can see beauty in a derelict shit-house, she must have more [sensibility] than you. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. By 1962, however, when he wrote “Toads Revisited,” free time had come to look less attractive, a haven for the stupid or the weak, while his in-tray and “loaf-haired secretary” (Betty Mackereth, with whom he had a late-flowering affair that produced at least two recently discovered poems) offered comforting stability.

Here, Larkin's prose is habitually perfunctory and pressureless: "Sun still shining here, but 'not for long' I fear"; "Of course, I might have been peevish anyway. At one point in 1973 he laments that he hasn't written to her for a while ("sign we have been together"), as if the letter was the primary encounter. Against this, Larkin’s claim that the engagement was “to give myself a sincere chance of ‘opening out’ towards someone I do love a lot in a rather strangled way, and to help her take her Finals” sounds embarrassingly self-justificatory. On the front side, facing right, is Philip Larkin: tall, slim, balding, elegantly dressed in sports jacket and tan pants, with sandals as a concession to the holiday season, and unencumbered except for what looks like a pair of binoculars.

There is something of Mass Observation about them - reflections on life, literature, domestic chores and personal feelings . Philip Larkin and Monica Jones at the memorial service for John Betjeman at Westminster Abbey, June 1984. Yet Larkin can also respond with rapt delight to a Dickensian Christmas landscape, to early summer flowers (may, hawthorn, chestnut candles, cowparsley), or to birdsong at dawn—though early deafness was soon to isolate him.

He said he loved her, and they talked many times about living together and even getting married, but Larkin maintained their separation and indeed had relationships with other women. It does rather spoil the incident, even at best, which was very exciting for me anyway…" What can the complication have been, damaging her but not him? All the old arguments that he had trotted out to pacify Ruth—his distrust of marriage, his need for privacy—were now refurbished for Monica, whose sharp critical intelligence was not taken in for one moment. In this fond struggle between two passive-aggressive types, each of them trying to finesse some decisiveness out of the other, she must have known that a double negative was the most she could hope for.Philip Larkin was a committophobe's committophobe, king of the ditherers, and his inadequacy was the only thing he was sure of. He published four volumes of poetry – The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) – for which he received innumerable honours including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the WH Smith Award. At the same time he was juggling his close and needy relationship with his recently widowed mother, Eva.