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.”