Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin: Larkin's Jazz

by Chris May
July 21, 2010

The author of the immortal opening couplet, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do," the poet Philip Larkin (1922-85) was in 2008 voted “the greatest British writer" of the last half century by the readers of The Times. No longer the newspaper of record it was in the decades prior to its acquisition by the loathsome Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation, who between them have done so much to debase British ...