Love Betjers, beyond all the obvious he's got it nailed.

Anyone who likes KA - either the novels or the poems - has got to read the Collected Letters - it is an utter delight and a laugh a page - and a great tragedy, too.

Frank

Re Letters. You need Larkin's letters too. Thwaite's letters are the best way to get at Larkin. Motion's biography is quite bad, really.

Motion's biography is certainly detailed, but he does go rather out of his way to distance himself from the subject by editorialising all of the less fortunate aspects of the Larkin story (such as it is and such as they are). Richard Bradford's book has some good lit crit but is an irrelevance as a biography. The Letters is fascinating, and entertaining, and a great companion to the Amis Letters. There are a number of letters to JB in there, too.

Absolutely agree with Frank, the KA letters is just about the funniest book I ever read. I have got to get the Larkin letters too. (Rather oddly, in later years Phil was a correspondence-friend of Barbara Pym, and his letters to her are highly entertaining without using any words that would shock a proper Anglican lady).