Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. The Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull stands as a monument to his brilliance in a career that he affected to despise. Nor does his dislike for venturing anywhere beyond the British Isles—a trait that he shared with literary characters as diverse as John Betjeman and Kingsley Amis, not to mention Nancy Mitford’s father, Lord Redesdale, the model for Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love, who was fond of saying that “abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.

He frequently wrote her about the progress of what he was working on and about the activities involved in getting published and giving readings. The person this letter describes is not just an individual but a familiar and fearsome type: the congenital, and unstoppable, windbag.

He organized every aspect of its planning and its building, acquiring for the purpose a vast amount of technical and architectural knowledge. Larkin was demurely diffident (though he retained his "impeccable attentive courtesy: grave, but at the same time sunlit," as Kingsley would say in his funeral address, four years later). I think perhaps the rabbit takes your place at times, or stays behind when you go out to an evening at the Frasers.

For Larkin she is his rabbit, his “dearest bun” (and often represented as such, aproned, in surprisingly skillful little sketches included with his letters). Why, oh why, I kept asking myself as I read more and more by and about him, couldn’t the idiot see when he was truly well off? Slack, sloppy, sly, drivelling, daft, narrow, knobby, vacant, vicious, vulpine, vulturous - every kind of ugliness was represented, not once but tenfold. Larkin and Jones had a cult of the fluffy rodent, in a running joke that acquired its own seriousness. Margaret is not only plain, theatrical, garrulous and of course boring; she is also a lying manipulator bent on entrapment.The reasons he gives Monica for not marrying her (often rehearsed) are the same reasons he surely gave himself for not leaving her. Not surprisingly, in a rambling discussion of their attitudes to sex, we learn that while Monica wants personal emotion in making love, he does not see the act that way at all, and to pretend otherwise would be faking it. WHAT ON the surface he wanted, and more or less admitted, was to enjoy all the conveniences of an available lover without most of the concomitant financial or emotional responsibilities. I'd defy anyone to read this and not be impressed by his honesty, judgement and emotional intelligence.

These words were written after more than a decade in which, as a librarian (despite his barrage of self-deprecatory throwaway remarks), he had shown himself conscientious, inventive, well-informed, hard-working, and even somewhat professional, while midwifing the first of the postwar British university libraries to birth, something that no “book-drunk freak” could ever have done. We may take it as significant that the word "boring" is used here in an unexpected application – as a verb rather than a naked adjective. He said of Mansfield's journal that it made readers "more sensitive, more receptive, happier than before".

This is a proper correspondence, intelligent but easy, fluent, encouraging; we see the charm and the point of sitting down, at the end of the day, or the beginning of an evening, and putting one's thoughts into writing, and sending them off to someone we love. The day didn't get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by 'Flannery O'Connor' in the bath – horribly depressing American South things. Larkin's clarity, his almost clinical over-sensitivity (naturally vital to his genius), could not be muted or muffled.

The photograph also makes them look as though they had, in some sense, been living in a time warp: there is an unmistakable air of the late 1940s about them, and each in his or her way—Larkin more noticeably, as their correspondence hints—had a distinct aversion to the unwelcome business of growing up. Hence the Channel Islands and, later, the Hebrides: sea and mountains without—a cherished national myth—all that tedious business involving passports, Monopoly money, dysentery, and being shaken down by Frogs, Wops, or Dagoes sheltering behind a stream of incomprehensible jabber, plus a culture founded on shameless bribery and ooh-la-la. What we do not find, surprisingly, is all that much about Larkin’s own work, let alone Monica’s role in it.What Larkin ruefully described as his “misengagement” dragged on long after he and Monica met in 1946, and was only resolved, amid emotional stress all round, in 1950—Monica and Philip became lovers that summer. She was a formidable but not threatening reader, making it clear that her admiration for Larkin's poetry functioned separately from her personal feeling for him. N. Wilson, I disliked being told what to think, and sometimes saw Larkin, as he did, as a character perilously close to the uncle “shouting smut” in “The Whitsun Weddings. Two of the other three women in Larkin's life were similarly "superior": the aggressively "permissive" Patsy Strang (who drank herself to death at the age of 48); and the virginal, religious and implausibly naive Maeve Brennan (who claimed, in her maturity, not to know the meaning of the word "wank"). When she points out that he tends to be chilly in letters after a successful meeting, as if to re-establish distance, he does better.