Philip Larkin was the greatest English poet of the 20th century.

And he is famous for one of the most risqué lines in the canon and which certainly can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

Beyond his talent he is also known for his oscillating friendship with another of our best-known novelists, the late Kingsley Amis, who he met at Oxford and with whom he shared a taste for drink, wicked ribaldry, misogyny and a casual racism.

Larkin was also a reactionary, a porn addict, who disliked children intensely and he kept a selection of women on the go at once.

When all this was revealed in 1993 following Andrew Motion’s biography and in his Selected Letters the previous year, there were no shortage of candidates queueing up to pour bile all over him.

Tom Paulin said the letters showed: “the sewer under the national monument Larkin became” while Professor Lisa Jardine gloried in the lack of Larkin teaching in her English department.

So, not everyone’s cup of tea, then. Quite why people should get quite so worked up about a man most of them had never met is another matter but there it is.

And there was another side to the man. Incredibly witty and a brilliant mimic, he was bedevilled by a fear of death from his 20s and developed a bizarre love/hate relationship with intense loneliness.

Not a natural ladies’ man he nonetheless had a strange kind of charisma which attracted women. Monica Jones, an English lecturer and Maeve Brennan were devoted to him while he managed to add a third, his secretary, in his fifties.

Indeed, so persuasive was he that he told long-term girlfriend Monica that he had to keep his relationship with Maeve going because she now depended upon him and it would be an act of cruelty to “turn her away’’.

And he even managed to keep Monica sweet despite feeding Amis – who couldn’t stand her – cruel vignettes of her, which he then turned into the manipulative Margaret Peel in his best-known novel Lucky Jim.

Tellingly, when Larkin died Monica went to pieces.

Her lover, who he described in his letters as precious ‘bun’ and who often signed them ‘love you always’ was no more.

A new biography by James Booth, who taught English at Hull University during Larkin’s long tenure there, aims to show another more human, generous side to his character.

And, although he could be infuriated by his dull mother, he was an intensely dutiful son who wrote to her several times a week and who took her away on holidays.

Though there’s no getting away from his dislike of children he was very loving when it came to animals, to such an extent that he left half of his estate to the RSPCA.

Beyond that, he was charming with a shy manner and someone who enjoyed cycling and foaming pints of ale.

Personally, I find him a fascinating character: all those massive contradictions heaped together made him a hugely complex character.

He was his own man and as well as leaving a legacy of poignant, elegiac verse he was a brilliant critic, who could shred reputations in just a few perfectly chosen scissor-like words. Like Kingsley they both enjoyed created elaborate parodies of themselves.

While ‘Kingers’ revelled in his red-faced clubman act Larkin perfected his curmudgeon persona.

Much of it was simply posturing, done to amuse one another, a sophisticated high wire performance.

And who could entirely resist a man who used to mow his lawn wearing a D H Lawrence T-Shirt?!