Danny Karlin

Danny Karlin, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Bristol, is the author of Browning’s Hatreds and the editor of The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse.

When the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu at last meets his idol, the great writer Bergotte, he gets a terrible shock: instead of the ‘white-haired, sweet Singer’ of his imagination, he sees ‘a young man, uncouth, short, thickset and myopic, with a red nose shaped like a snail-shell and a black goatee’. The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that...

Julie Otsuka’s novella When the Emperor Was Divine tells, in discontinuous sections and different narrative modes, the story of a Japanese-American family split up in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor – the father detained in military camps, the mother and two children interned in the Utah desert. The first part of the story – from Roosevelt’s issuing of...

Letter

Rival Brownings

23 May 2002

Danny Karlin writes: I am indeed both Danny and Daniel, but I don’t recognise either of my selves as brusquely dismissing the Broadview (not Penguin) or Oxford editions. I hope someone in the future dismisses my work by saying it ‘can hardly be bettered for clarity and informativeness’ and ‘richly enhances and illuminates’ its subject, as I say of Hawlin and Burnett’s excellent introduction....

At the very end of The Ring and the Book Browning delivers one of the most staggering mule-kicks ever meted out by an author to his readers. Bear in mind that the poem is more than 21,000 lines of blank verse – about twice the length of Paradise Lost. It was published in four monthly instalments, each containing three books of the poem, which appeared from November 1868 to February...

Letter
Bernard Porter (LRB, 25 April) is wrong to state that Kipling referred to his first English school as the ‘House of Desolation’. He gave this name to the house in Southsea where his parents brought him from India and left him, at the age of five and in the company of his three-year-old sister; they returned to India and he did not see them again for nearly six years. This may have been a common...

Ventriloquism: Dear Old Khayyám

Marina Warner, 9 April 2009

Edward FitzGerald transfused his own life, even as he deemed it a paltry thing, into the persona of Omar Khayyám, who would lift it from that paltriness and transfigure him. He was able to formulate through...

Read more reviews

I’ve been comparing Daniel Karlin’s anthology here and there with other anthologies of English verse of the same period (Victoria’s reign 1837-1901) and of the 19th century as a...

Read more reviews

When in Rom

John Sutherland, 9 June 1994

Ask what has been the single greatest influence on literary research since the Sixties and the answer might be the Xerox machine, the jumbo jet or Jacques Derrida. Ask what will transform...

Read more reviews

Browning and Modernism

Donald Davie, 10 October 1991

Browning is in high favour once again, or promises to be. Has not A.S. Byatt, CBE, declared him ‘one of the very greatest English poets’? In a switch to fighting talk, she adds that...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences