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Simon Armitage unpicks Philip Larkin while Ian Hislop explores the land of net curtains. Elsewhere, the legacy of Partition and the thoughts of Afghan refugees in BritainLast week, Radio 4 marked the centenary of his birth by grappling with the contested legacy of Philip Larkin, one of England’s greatest and most problematic poets. In the first episode of Larkin Revisited, a series that will explore that legacy through 10 poems, the presenter, poet laureate Simon Armitage, found himself discussing the word “dull” with his fellow poet Ian McMillan. Not perhaps the most promising of starts but, in its own way, Larkinesque.The context was the poem Born Yesterday, which Larkin wrote for his friend Kingsley Amis’s newborn daughter, Sally. In it, he wishes her not beauty and innocence, but a life of drab ordinariness: “May you, in fact, be dull.” For McMillan, Larkin’s particular genius was made clear in the lines that immediately followed, where he audaciously redefined the word “dull” as a “vigilant, flexible/ Unemphasised, enthralled/ Catching of happiness”. It reminded us, McMillan said, of “all the things that dull can be, that ordinary can be”. Well, maybe so, but I can’t have been the only listener thinking: hang on a minute, isn’t a life of flexibility, vigilance and enthralment the very opposite of dull? Continue reading...