For their first episode together, recorded in 2017, Mark Ford and Seamus Perry look at the life and work of Philip Larkin ... I think the erotic is also crucial to Larkin’s work, as it is to Hardy’s.

Across ten programmes and ten Philip Larkin poems, Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, finds out what happens when he revisits and unpicks Larkin's work in his centenary year. Show more Across ten ...

This story appears in the April 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine. If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water, wrote the English poet Philip Larkin in 1954 ...