We may identify in "The Last Mohican" themes of flight, poverty, loneliness, persecution, the love of learning, bitterness and antically ironic humor.
But in tones strong and plaintive, and sometimes sweet, and with a linguistic manner alternately ironic, sentimental and tinged by a hint of bitterness, he expounded generously on his life's twin passions: football and firefighting.
A short man, slight and bald, with huge eyeglasses, he was, at eighty-three, sharp-minded, ironic, and disillusioned, and his humor was seasoned with bitterness.
The film specialises as much in a kind of ironic gallows humour as in laughter pure and simple, but bitterness is also avoided - which is a small miracle in itself considering the subject matter and the setting.
And it's ironic that people who fight racism by imagining and quoting with bitterness the very disgusting and potentially unlimited obsession of racists, are perceived as racists themselves.
Bradford makes a point of noting that Larkin kept these travels, and the photographs they inspired, a secret from pen pals like Kingsley Amis, for whom he reserved obscenity-filled reports of his own bitterness and alienation — his wide-eyed curiosity replaced by an ironic sneer.
His music, which intertwines post-grunge vocals with over-the-top guitar riffs, now reverberates with a hint of bitterness and bit of sadness that part comes with the tragically ironic line, "I'll never long for what might have been".
"It's kind of ironic given that, for a long time, I was struggling to get stuff published," he says without bitterness.
"The bitterness of the unhappily famous isn't much of a replacement for the determinedly doomed's ironic charm," sniffed the NME.
He insisted to me without bitterness but with a wistful and shrewd discontent: "There is no home, I acknowledge no community". It was an ironic and lapidary statement by a man so honoured and esteemed both at "home" and abroad.
