Anthony Thwaite was born in 1930. He spent his childhood in Yorkshire, the USA (1940-44) and school in Somerset. After national service in Libya he read English at Oxford. He then married and went to Japan for two years, where he taught English Literature at Tokyo University. Since then he has been a BBC radio producer, literary editor of the Listener and the New Statesman, co-editor of Encounter, and in 1986 was chairman of the Booker Prize judges. He is a literary executor of Philip Larkin and the editor of his Collected Poems and Selected Letters. He is a regular reviewer for the Guardian and other journals. In 1990 he was made an OBE for services to poetry.

'[The poems] knit together, almost as a mosaic, and the book has a consistent tone which is elegiac but also delightfully physical.' Peter Porter'He gets even better as he grows older.' P. J. Kavanagh