Karl Miller

Karl Miller was the first editor of the LRB.

Letter

Too extreme

11 July 1991

Karl Miller writes: When I was literary editor of the New Statesman, I was in the habit of publishing verse and prose by Sylvia Plath, and I came to know her a bit. When a selection of her last poems was sent, my first response was to consider her state of mind and to make enquiries. I was afraid she might take her life. Such is the tormented state of Plath studies that it is only to be expected that...
Letter
Karl Miller writes: If he can manage a letter like this, Bruno Nightingale should surely be writing for the Observer. It was once a great newspaper, and is still a good one. I don’t suggest that Neal Ascherson is snobbish, or that John Naughton is, or that the news pages are. But it has too much of its own kind of snobbery. It is far too interested in top persons, eminent politicians, media stars...

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On the train, sunk on dusty and sagging cushions in our corner seats, Lotte and I spoke of our attachment to one another. I was as weak as I could be when I got off the train. We made our way to...

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Being two is half the fun

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‘The principal thing was to get away.’ So Conrad wrote in A Personal Memoir, and there is a characteristic division between the sobriety of the utterance, its air of principled and...

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Adulterers’ Distress

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The order in which we read the short stories in a collection makes a difference. Our hopping and skipping out of sequence can often disturb the lines or blunt the point of a special arrangement,...

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