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.

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....
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...
Letter

Undesirable

9 May 1996

I hesitate to respond to Tom Paulin because what I have to say about the subject of Eliot and anti-semitism is personal and anecdotal. I own a copy of T.S. Eliot’s poems stamped with the crest of St Paul’s School and given to me as a school prize. At the time I went to St Paul’s there was a quota for the entry of Jewish pupils: the school’s Christian orientation (it was founded by John Colet,...
Letter

Jobs Wanted

22 February 1996

I have reached the end of Iain Sinclair’s piece (LRB, 22 February) and am lost in admiration. Here is a man who, in the dust-clouds of narcissism, malice, puffery and insider-speak which make up his back-handed (or rear-ended) tribute to Peter Ackroyd, has slipped away with £273-worth of the Tate Gallery’s collected edition of William Blake’s illuminated books. Have these been well produced,...
Letter

Clubbability

11 March 1993

Alasdair Gray’s dismissal of that well-known Victorian triple-headed verse-monster ‘Tennyson, Browning and Arnold’, as ‘hardly ever reflecting their nation’, is facile and dim, but I read it with resignation, just like the time before and the time before that; in Victorian poetry that’s just the way things go (LRB, 11 March). What’s harder to swallow is this: ‘Leopardi, Schopenhauer,...

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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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