Philip Larkin : a retrospect

'When I go down...I shall begin reading English literature.

This occupation will take up the rest of my time until I am dead' - Letter of 23 October, 1942, from Larkin to Hamburger.

Michael Hamburger's 'precarious relationship' with Philip Larkin lasted from their Oxford days - through a ten-year silence - to brief encounters before Larkin's death in 1985.

In this moving memoir, Hamburger charts their troubled friendship through detailed commentaries on Larkin's correspondence.

Insistent on leaving the letters 'to speak for themselves', Hamburger writes with poignant honesty about the poets' differences, such as quibbles over foreign poetry and taste in music.Previously unpublished, the letters reveal echoes of many of the persistent themes of Larkin's poetry - his work, obsession with death, loneliness, reluctance to travel and 'self-punishing austerity'.

The memoir also includes a 1955 "TLS" review of "The Less Deceived", which Hamburger claims 'may have helped in a small way to make amends for the neglect that Larkin's work had suffered until that time'. In highlighting contradictions between Larkin's 'inmost nature' and his public persona, and in providing literary criticism of his poems and novels, this is an invaluable addition to our understanding of both poets.