The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin

Despite an opening sentence that seems to promise a hagiography (“During a three-year period between the mid-1950s and the 1980s, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin produced, respectively, the finest fiction and poetry of the era”), The Odd Couple is a highly perceptive and well-researched account of how Larkin and Amis impacted each other’s work. The book is too narrow to be of interest to those not familiar with at least one of the writers, and Bradford's reading of Amis is more intelligent than that of Larkin, but this is otherwise a very good literary analysis.