Coventry is used to being written off. But it always makes a comeback. Forty years on from being labelled a ‘Ghost Town’, it is to be the next UK City of Culture. After Hull, as it happens, the place where Philip Larkin was head librarian at the university’s Brynmor Jones Library.

His love of libraries, of books, of poetry began in the city where he was born, went to school and spent his first 18 years. His childhood was not unspent , as he claimed in I Remember, I Remember.

He remembered it all too well, the good times as well as the bad, and was devastated by the Luftwaffe’s prolonged bombardment of one of England’s great mediaeval cities shortly after he had left for Oxford.

Larkin About in Coventry goes behind the great poet’s curmudgeonly facade and truffles out the places where he was content and even happy in his youth. It also takes a fresh look at a city that has two thriving universities and a burgeoning arts scene. Not a ghost town but a host town for cultures from around the globe.

Chris Arnot has been a national freelance journalist and author since 1991. His last book, Small Island by Little Train, has been republished in paperback by the AA after being shortlisted for the Edward Stanford awards for outstanding travel-writing. He has written six other books, co-authored The Archers’ Archives for the BBC and ghost-wrote eminent educationalist David Kershaw’s autobiography Thanks Shanks, how Bill Shankly bought me an education, for Takahe Publishing.