Holy shit,” Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old in nineteen-seventies San Francisco (played by Bel Powley), narrates as the film begins. In the latest exclusive online essay from the London Review of Books, Jenny Diski examines Larkin's newly-published juvenilia and questions whether such literary excavation is simply barrel-scraping. When she meets David, a suave older man played by Peter Sarsgaard, he takes her to films, jazz clubs, and Paris—a precocious teen’s dream of adulthood. As if reading Barbara Pym were not evidence enough, Booth suggests that Larkin also retreated into the feminine in face of the war (didn't want to go into the army) and his father's fascism (seems rather to have come to terms with that later).

Set in 1961 and based on the journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir, the film stars Carey Mulligan as an English sixteen-year-old named Jenny who, impatient to escape the routine of youth-orchestra rehearsals and Latin exams, peppers her speech with French phrases and holds forth on Camus.

The artefacts with which the acolyte is working are so precious as to require the minutest description of their physical reality.

It's what some literary academics do for a living, I know, hanging on the every word of their chosen one, but when it comes down to scratching about at the bottom of the barrel of the 21-year-old Larkin's doodlings during the summer after leaving university, it's time to head for the kitchen and get the mushroom scraper out. Um, the impact of "Yeats's poems spoken by women (A Woman Young and Old) is audible in such poems as Wedding-Wind and Deep Analysis and, less directly, in the Brunette works'" Much less directly, I should say.Even as his flaws become apparent (he is, it develops, a con man), David offers a worldliness that is irresistible. Occasion: sleepwear, nightwear, underwear, honeymoon, valentine's or wedding night, honeymoon or every hot night.