News about Philip Larkin

How very odd it is that we pay so much attention to MI5 and its chief Ken McCallum, warning us last week of all the perils supposedly stalking the land, which just so happen to justify his enormous budget. Have you ever heard the head of a tax-funded organisation pleading for fewer resources, or downplaying his importance? No, nor have I. Well, you may believe all this if you wish. But first ask yourself what MI5 is. The answer is disturbing, and doesn't really fit with my idea of what sort of country this is. Many people wrongly refer to it as a spy service, and to its boss as a 'spy chief'. But it is not. It works entirely at home. It is in fact a secret police force which once quite justifiably kept an eye on Nazi and Communist sympathisers, who were in many cases actively working for our national enemies during the Second World War and the Cold War. This was probably necessary, even if the idea is pretty repellent.

Dear Bel, I need help to get past a great hurt. I have three adult children, one each in Australia, New Zealand and Britain. They have just had a holiday all together in Thailand , with grandchildren and my son's new partner, whom I've not met yet. It felt so cruel, to arrange it and not include me. It has been my heart's desire to have time with them all. I had a special birthday this year and arranged a party hoping they would all come. Sadly the ­Australian family didn't. I tried not to let them see how gutted I was. But now this. I feel quite suicidal, such a failure. How do I go on, how can I have any kind of communication with them when I just wanted to hurt them back? How bad is that for a mother to say? I found out just before they were due to go and got fobbed off and one of them told me it's not all about me. How do people move on and not let the hurt eat away?

Downsizing makes sense. After all, most people need to free up a little extra cash after they stop working and the kids have flown the nest. But where in the country to move to? Obviously, the exact amount of equity released by moving to a smaller house varies from place to place - as does what each town, village or city can offer.

As Philip Larkin so succinctly put it in his famous poem, parents can really mess you up. In the lottery of life, some of us are lucky to have only known loving, nurturing mothers and fathers, while others are coping with lifelong psychological consequences of extremely bad parenting. To this end, what if you believe your father is a narcissist? How do you spot the telltale signs and, crucially, adopt effective coping strategies when you have such a damaging parent in your life?

Those who were presented to the Queen often found the experience discombobulating. Though it may have been the first time they had ever set eyes on her, they were often more familiar with her face than with their own. They knew it in profile; they knew it head-on; they had seen it refracted through the visions of countless artists and photographers. So to meet the Queen face-to-face was apt to make you feel giddy or woozy, as though a well-loved family portrait had suddenly sprung to life

Medical staff tending Princess Anne at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary when she suffered a chest infection in 2016 recall a formidable patient and advise a family member is nearby. 'They're the only people who can tell her to behave,' says one nurse.'The best advice is to keep her husband, Sir Tim Laurence , or one of the children on hand,'

For anyone who takes offence at the word 'bonkbuster', I'm afraid I am to blame. A couple of decades ago, I wrote a column describing sexy historical blockbusters as 'bonkbusters'. Of course, Jilly Cooper is known as the Queen of the Bonkbuster, with her shamelessly ­double-entendre book titles. In truth, I hate the word 'bonk' - it sounds like a bookcase falling downstairs. Still, it caught on and it's now in the dictionary. Today, the genre seems to be flushed with a second wind. But in the age of the #MeToo movement, can the bonkbuster really reprise its giddy heyday of the 1980s?

A campfire, 40,000 years ago. There is something about her - the way the flames' glow lights up her soft features, the plumpness of her lips, the arch of her back. He just wants to be near her, and she him. He is known for his hunting skills, often coming back with a feast for the group. The couple are magnetised, entranced. They pair up, have sex, have babies. The scene around the campfire in 38,000BC is not all that different from one in a nightclub today. Then, as now, we were driven to seek mates who would give us the best chance of passing on our genes.

As I pull my three-year-old son back from the car he's very nearly just jumped out in front of, I instinctively lean over to smack his legs. Whack goes my hand over the back of his chubby, toddler thighs. 'Don't ever, ever do that again!' I shout. 'Don't you realise you could have got run over? What were you thinking?' His shocked, tear-stained little face looks up at me as a series of loud sobs escape from his throat. 'I'm sorry, Mummy,' he howls. I immediately feel flooded with remorse and regret. I hug him and promise never to do it again. Two more children and 12 years later, I can't say I've kept that promise, though I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've smacked them. I'm still filled with shame when I think about it, but - as someone who was regularly hit as a child - I have tried to forgive myself too.

I travelled Auschwitz (Sabrina, pictured left), 40 miles from Krakow, southern Poland, as part of the European Jewish Association's two-day conference held last weekend to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day. 'We are reminded of the darkest days of the Jewish people and Europe here,' said former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin during a moving memorial service inside the camp.' "We invented the word "Never Again" when Birkenau-Auschwitz was freed, a hundred years ago.' I was positive the whole world learned a lesson before. But since October 7, I have been wondering: "Are those words just words, or do they mean something?"'

This scholarly fashion and interiors trend is sweeping TikTok, with 5.7 billion views and up on TikTok.

SHIRLEY CONRAN: Until we are going to lose it, few of us fully comprehend the force and power of real love. And with a front-row seat to the critically ill ward, I can almost feel the loving devotion. This embracing love for a worn-out, strained person is almost touching. It fills the ward with the stench of hyacinths: indescribable and barely discernible, but valuable because it is unique: it's not like it. I'm learning that death does not distinguish you from those you love, but you can no longer see, someone whose hand you have held for the first time. 'What will last of us is love,' poet Philip Larkin said, and I can see that he is correct in front of me.

Nina Stibbe is now Thunderclap, a memoir by art historian Laura Cumming, in which a dramatic event in 1654 in Delft is the catalyst for a profound discussion of Dutch art. Barbara Pym's collected works will be transported to a desert island.

Philippa Perry, a psychologist and agony aunt, has written a new relationships book called The Book You Want To Read after her immensely popular The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: William and Kate's attendance at Jordan's crown prince's wedding last week highlighted how cherished are ties with desert royalty. Most people attending overseas royal weddings are usually drawn to Edward and Sophie, but a source claims they may have been too low-ranking for this one. Despite the fact that the former king Charles and Abdullah were arrested in a violent coup attempt last May, they are still best mates.

Nell Frizzell, a writer and journalist, says she's currently reading a few books, including Lauren Bravo's debut book Preloved and This Won't Hurt: How Medicine Fails Women by Marieke Bigg. Heidi is Heidi's first book she ever read to herself, in its entirety.

ROGER LEWIS: I collapsed in a Hastings parking lot last Sunday and was given CPR by a passer-by. My heart had ceased, and I was briefly dead. With authority, I can confirm that there are no Pearly Gates nor any Fiery Furnace. Time has come to a complete halt. There isn't even any blackness or blankness to be aware of; or semi-aware of it. As Philip Larkin put it, 'the anaesthetic from which no one comes round.' Arrac arrest - The pharmacists from Morrisons broke out with their defibrillator gun, and I was taken aback.

This tragedy unfolds in three parts, each of which narrates a period in Oliver's life, the 18th century's Silbourne, his little hometown town, was going to study chemistry at Oxford. It's the ultimate setting for the suffocating English class system ('a crippling and horrific system,' Golding says), in which social status determines everything. Oliver, thwarted in love, cruelly blackmails Evie, a precocious, working-class 15-year‑old girl, into having sex - with unforeseen consequences

Ms Begum's (pictured) lawyers claim she was influenced by a 'determined and powerful ISIS propaganda machine' and should have been treated as a child smuggler. "We can use euphemisms such as jihadi bride or marriage, but the intention of taking these girls across was so that they could have sex with adult men," Dan Squires KC said. However, an MI5 observer found that Ms Begum did not know she was joining a terrorist group when she left her Bethnal Green, east London, with two other students, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, in 2015.

DOMINIC SANDBROOK: Of all the spectacular shows that have unfolded in our country's capital over the past 70 years, there has never been one like Queen Elizabeth II's funeral. It was also Britain's saddest day and our best, utterly stunning and yet poignant. And amid the pomp and glamour, it was difficult to forget that this was a farewell to an individual human being, a wife and mother with dreams and concerns that we may never know. And as I watched her children and grandchildren, I was reminded of many humbler funerals, much removed from the world's view. Of course, this was not just a private function. Such is the burden of monarchy. Even in death, there can be a great deal between the personal and the public for a queen.

The opposition leader praised her "total dedication to service and sacrifice," as well as the people she loved in a special session of the Commons, adding: "We loved her in return for that." Those decades, as MPs began a lengthy debate to honor the former king, who died on the throne on Monday, spent those decades 'at the center of this country's life,' he said. 'She did not reign over us, she lived alongside us,' he said. "She spoke about our hopes and fears, our joy and our sorrow, our good times and our mishape.' Our Queen played a key role in the link between the past we treasure and the present we have.'

The University of Warwick has issued a warning far from the Madding Crowd (inset), which depicts the brutal reality of Victorian rural life. Thomas Hardy's (19th Century work (right) explores Bathsheba Everdene's loves and marriages, as well as faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak (left), Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts appear as the characters in the book's 2015 film version). Gabriel's two hundred pregnant ewes are chased by his dog and crash to their deaths off a cliff in one scene. He kills his inexperienced sheepdog and becomes penniless after this. Four of Bathsheba's sheep died after eating a field of clover in a separate chapter. The Warwick's English Department set the alarm off the novel in the midst of scenes in which students could be 'upset by' as the story depicts the 'cruelty of nature and the rural life'.