John Sutherland W&N £20 Rating: Monica Jones wasted her life hoping to become Mrs Philip Larkin. Larkin, unquestionably a poet of genius, while simultaneously a deeply unpleasant man, made it clear to her he had no intention of being trapped ‘behind the wallbars of matrimony’. For over 30 years they lived 100 miles apart: she in Leicester and he in Hull, spending one weekend in four together, with an annual holiday on the Channel Islands. Contemporaries at Oxford, both Jones and Larkin graduated with firsts. But her academic career stalled, and she refused to publish any books. Larkin, meanwhile, became feted as a literary great.