Anthony Thwaite: Editor and poet who helped shape Philip Larkin s legacy yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Died April 22, 2021 FOR the best part of seven decades Anthony Thwaite, who has died aged 90, swam serenely through the piranha-rich waters of literary London. His curriculum vitae included spells as literary editor of the Listener, the New Statesman and Encounter. He was a familiar voice on the BBC, where he was a producer for five years, chairman of the Booker Prize in 1986 (when the winner was Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils), a stalwart of Arts Council committees and a regular guest on British Council foreign tours. Quintessentially English, he wrote poetry that was witty, lucid and plain-speaking. It was his friendship with another poet, Philip Larkin, that drew his name to the attention of the wider public. He was the first person to read Larkin’s poem ‘This Be The Verse’, which opens with a punch to the solar plexus: “They f you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do.”
The poster for Sunday Bloody Sunday. Photograph: United Artists/Kobal/Shutterstock
The poster for Sunday Bloody Sunday. Photograph: United Artists/Kobal/Shutterstock
Sun 2 May 2021 02.30 EDT
Some people mark wedding anniversaries with flowers. But in this house, we do things differently. On the morning of our 15th wedding anniversary last week, my domestic colleague staggered into the room carrying a poster for the greatest film about a love triangle that I know: John Schlesinger’s
Sunday Bloody Sunday, starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and Murray Head. Believe me – I’ve hardly stopped staring at it since.
As it happens,
Sunday Bloody Sunday celebrates an anniversary of its own later this year, when it will be 50 years old. I hope someone makes a fuss of it – this movie is so timelessly gorgeous and wise and still so utterly modern. Its screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt, then the film critic of this newspaper, is sharper, wittier and more finely wrought than Pinter�