Time for the tv mini series, no?

Interesting how misreadings sometimes shed light on submerged issues… Or how SH, having eaten his cake, refused to have it.

I believe the house in question was once a brothel (which might have aroused Larkin’s interest). Or else someone was pulling my leg.

Had to look up the list, I’m afraid. Think I know which book you mean, but haven’t read it (or any of the others). I may do, but am in no hurry. My bad, as they say. I’ve seen too many in my time to take prizes and shortlists at all seriously.

I wonder could we make 'late splurge' a common term - I quite like it! W.S. Landor is the only poet (to my knowledge) whose complete poems has, as well as a 'Juvenilia' section, one called simply 'Senilia'. Which again I like: a useful category (no names, no pack drill).

Well, yes. Though I've always found it quite funny, Geoffrey desperately covering all the bases. I'm sorry he dropped it for the Collected (Broken Hierarchies), since this deadpan, Les Dawson-esque humour got lost. His last Ox Prof lecture ended with quotation from Charlie Brooker: "NOW GO AWAY".

The Elbow Room: long gone, but should have had a blue plaque - “Louis MacNeice (and half the BBC) often drank here while supposed to be working”.

Yes - he had recently left university. As I recall, it’s not that good! Some interesting moments re Ulster (the Reverend Bilbatrox), but otherwise very much a curiosity. He didn’t try it again …

Belloc, yes? I like it, and think it’s more bold than sentimental. Line 2 dares a Wordsworian almost-bathos in diction, but the whole thing is tightly-knit. (Good poems can be sentimental, but by soaking up the sentimental rather than wallowing in it, if that makes sense.)

No perhaps about it, in my view. And anyway (as EP said) damn perhapses!

Yes indeed: I actually remember this. Didn’t he also, around this time, give the bum’s rush to a Derek Walcott volume? (Though I’m old enough now to be imagining as well as remembering things… or even confusing Paul with Craig Raine, horribile dictu…)

Funnily enough I read this too, a couple of weeks ago. On a train, as it happens! Very good, I agree.