Tribute: Anthony Thwaite

 Anthony Thwaite, who died in April 2021 at the age of 90, was an old friend of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship. Early in our history, we held a conference - perhaps a little ambitiously - at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The speakers included Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Neil Brand. Also generously giving their time to us were Anthony Thwaite and his wife Ann, who read selections from the work of Siegfried Sassoon.

    Dr Ann Thwaite is a distinguished writer, best known for her biographies, who had at one time been selected by Rupert Hart-Davis as his preferred candidate to produce an official life of Siegfried Sassoon. For various reasons, this never came to pass; however, Ann remained a Sassoon "fan", and spoke to us again at our conference in Cambridge in 2008, where she was accompanied for the weekend by her husband Anthony, although on this occasion he remained a mere audience member. 

    Anthony Thwaite had preceded his wife into print, but theirs was very much a partnership of equals, and he was good enough to show no displeasure when, on first meeting, I praised Ann's achievements whilst revealing that I had never heard of him or his poetry. Later I would learn that, in addition to his own illustrious literary career, he was Philip Larkin's literary executor and had played a major role in editing Larkin's work and making it more widely available.

    Born in Chester, Anthony spent the Second World War in the United States with relatives, returning to do his National Service in Libya, which instilled in him a lifelong interest in archaeology. At Oxford, he edited the university magazine Isis, and his poems were soon being published in national magazines. After marrying Ann in the mid 1950s, he travelled with her to Japan, where, like Sassoon's friend Edmund Blunden, he taught at a university. His literary career expanded to include editing and criticism, and he was in demand throughout the world as a reader of his own work and a commentator on that of others.

   On one memorable occasion, Anthony and Ann performed a joint reading of the letters of Philip Larkin and Barbara Pym at her former Oxford college, St Hilda's. In 1989, Anthony edited the letters for radio, and readings have since been performed at the Oxford Literary Festival and many other occasions, by a variety of well-known actors and actresses. He also edited Larkin's letters to Monica Jones and introduced these on Radio 4. Like Larkin, he was at one time Chair of the Booker Prize judges' panel. Like Sassoon, he worked as a literary editor, in his case of The Listener and the New Statesman. 

   The Guardian described Anthony Thwaite as "a mover and shaker in postwar English literary life".