On Boxing Day 1968, Philip Larkin settled at a desk in his mother’s house to treat Monica Jones (the most enduring and most troubled of his girlfriends) to a festive missive emblazoned with the heading “GLUM LETTER”. “God! It seems a waste of a life,” he wrote: “I suppose someone someday will explain what went wrong. I can’t believe I am so much more unpleasant than everyone else.”At this stage in his life Larkin’s literary reputation was secure. The North Ship, The Less Deceived, and The Whitsun Weddings had all been published to great acclaim; he was stamping his literary taste on the age with his edition of The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse; he was an admired and successful university librarian. So what had gone wro