Overview

Karl Miller is one of the greatest literary critics of the last fifty years, the founder of the London Review of Books and Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London. In this last book of essays he turns his attention to appreciate certain writers of the English-speaking modern world. Most of them are inhabitants of the North Sea archipelago once known as Great Britain, who are here seen as tribally distinct, as Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh, and as a single society. A new ruralism has come to notice in this country, and the book is drawn to country lives as they have figured in the literature of the last century. An introductory essay is centred on the Anglo-Welsh borderlands. Journeys taken with Seamus Heaney and Andrew O'Hagan to this countryside, and others, are threaded throughout the book. The poets Heaney and Ted Hughes are discussed, together with the fiction of Ian McEwan, the Canadian writer Alistair Macleod, the Irish writer John McGahern and the Baltimorean Anne Tyler. Scotland is a preoccupation of the later pieces, including the letters of Henry Cockburn, a lifelong interest of the author, who is also interested here in foxes and their current metropolitan profile.

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9780857385802

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Reviews

'He is widely thought to be a brilliant diagnoser of Scotland's psychological doubleness or split personality ... an inner-space of great imaginative richness and cultural complexity ... as an artefact, the book shows how creatively a critical mind can play across whatever is thrown in its way in the course of a book-reviewing career, but it also sustains a certain political role - as diplomat as much as translator - in the uneasy relationship between the metropolitan and the 'country', the centralising ideology of an 'official' culture and the devoted or the preterite ... this is a book to be read slowly and ideally aloud' The Scottish Review of Books. 'a wonderful account of explorations a trois of the Celtic parts of Great Britain' Eric Hobsbawm, The Guardian. 'Miller writes thoughtfully on the role of place in literature and the ways in which authors' relationships with particular place shape their creative work' The Good Book Guide.

'He is widely thought to be a brilliant diagnoser of Scotland's psychological doubleness or split personality ... an inner-space of great imaginative richness and cultural complexity ... as an artefact, the book shows how creatively a critical mind can play across whatever is thrown in its way in the course of a book-reviewing career, but it also sustains a certain political role - as diplomat as much as translator - in the uneasy relationship between the metropolitan and the 'country', the centralising ideology of an 'official' culture and the devoted or the preterite ... this is a book to be read slowly and ideally aloud' The Scottish Review of Books.

Author Information

Karl Miller was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh and Cambridge and Harvard Universities. He became literary editor of the Spectator and the New Statesman as well as editor of the Listener, and went on the found The London Review of Books, which he edited for many years. From 1974 to 1992 he served as Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London. His books include Cockburn's Millennium, which received the James Tait Black Memorial Award, Doubles, Authors, and two volumes of Autobiography, Rebecca's Vest and Dark Horses. A Life of James Hoggart, Electric Shepherd appeared in 2003.

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