When Philip Larkin first met Kingsley Amis at Oxford in the early 1940s, he was appalled, he later said, to find himself 'for the first time in the presence of a talent greater than mine'. Did he really believe this, or was he just measuring his own late adolescent bumptiousness? And what did Amis feel? According to his 1991 Memoirs, Kingsley found Larkin just a shade offputting. Togged up in wine-coloured trousers plus checked shirt and bow tie, this gangling provincial seemed to be projecting himself as some kind of dandy aesthete: 'a little ridiculous in appearance, anyway outlandish, unlikely, on one's hasty summing up, to be attractive to girls'.

LRB 1 June 2000 | PDF Download