Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin - Tapa dura

'Nearly all critical biographies relate the work to the life - insidiously, tendentiously, helplessly. Richard Bradford is different; he does it proclaimedly, and with vigour. The result is an original and stimulating book.' - Martin Amis 'I found Bradford's approach refreshing... Rare among literary critics he writes clearly, doesn't show off and knows a lot about his subject.' - Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday 'An intelligent and interesting account of Amis's life, written with an unstrident ease, lucidity and sympathy that would surely have pleased its subject. Bradford is particularly perceptive on the relationship with Philip Larkin, whose superior genius awed and inspired Amis.' - Rupert Christiansen, Spectator

He formed a spectrum of impressions which invariably interferes with any reading of his verse. Lisa Jardine, when writing about High Windows, forgot the poems and concentrated on the 'casual habitual racist, [this] easy misogynist...who relished savagely abusing acquaintances'. Even Andrew Motion treats Larkin's later, controversial poems with a kind of embarressed circuitousness, providing, contra Jardine, a dignified fabric of excuse. Richard Bradford's life of the poet will engage directly with Larkin the man, his writings and the controversies surrounding both. It will go beyond the condescending tolerance by those commentators who see Larkin as a terrible man who wrote beautiful verse and will tackle head-on the politically correct McCarthyism which attends his status in academia (two US universities have effectively banned his poetry). Larkin is difficult to categorise because he is an assortment of contradictions. In someways he is an index to to the mood or mind-set of post-war Britain, or at least those aspects of it that all but middle-aged Tories would want to forget: an intolerant, provincial reactionary. In others he is a disturbing assembly of cosmopolitan radicalism: a Lawrentian, a Freudian who experimented with bisexuality and treated monogamy as an unnatural imposition, a man whose father took him to Germany in the 1930s to impress upon him the benefits of Nazism, an experience from which he never fully recovered.