The beginning of my teens came ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’. I regard it as highly appropriate that Larkin made the first of those milestones a novel, because it wasn’t only sex and rock and roll that had begun. Penguin Modern Classics, in their distinctive slate-grey livery, had also arrived, providing us hungry young readers with a list of books to grow up by. In due course PMC introduced me to Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway and Camus – and, later, Gide, Hesse and Sartre – offering the chance to luxuriate in amoral existential disgust, in contemplation of the meaning of meaninglessness.