Showing posts with label Blake Morrison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blake Morrison. Show all posts

Friday, December 8, 2023

My hero / Karl Miller by Blake Morrison

 

A reputation for severity … Karl Miller.


My hero: Karl Miller by Blake Morrison

Karl Miller, who died this week, had the ability to get the best out of people. That's what made him a great editor

Blake Morrison
Friday 26 September 2014

Imagination. Attention to detail. Courage in the face of controversy. An ability to get the best out of people. Few of us possess even one of those qualities. Karl Miller, who died this week, had them all, and that's what made him a great editor.

He got a taste for it as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where Ted Hughes was among his contemporaries. Miller ran the book pages of the Spectator and New Statesman, and turned the Listener into a must-read weekly; he then founded and co-edited the London Review of Books.

He had a reputation for severity, often attributed to an Edinburgh childhood, and essential when dealing with writers, not all of whom give literary journalism their best shot. If he felt that someone should be using a semicolon instead of a comma, he'd get on the phone and argue the toss, and never mind if the someone was a Nobel laureate or Booker prizewinner. A few foolishly resented his scrupulousness. Most were grateful. And it wasn't just his editing that was fearless; his commissioning was too. At the height of the Troubles, he got a poet called Seamus Heaney, little known and unused to reportage, to write from Belfast – with memorable results.

One of Karl's best books is called Doubles, about split personalities. His own had a softness to balance the hard. His standards may be demanding but he enjoyed a good joke and gossip, and followed football as closely as he did politics. Though he saw himself as embattled, the friends far outnumbered the enemies. And he was generous in encouraging young writers. "It's very good," he said, when I last saw him, about a first collection by the poet Emily Berry. From Karl, that was high praise.

I count myself lucky that he embarked on a second, midlife career, as a professor at University College London, shortly after I began my PhD there. He taught me how to think and write. In my head, he'll always be my first reader, difficult to please but astute at diagnosing what isn't working. There was no other editor like him.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray / Quotes
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
076 My hero / John Cooke by Geoffrey Robertson 
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
095 My hero / Les Murray by Daljit Nagra 
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan

211 My hero / Mavis Gallant by Jhumpa Lahiri and  Michael Ondaatje 

212 My hero / David Rayven Allen on John Arlott 




245 My hero / Geoffrey Chaucer by Lavinie Greenlan 

2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre 
2016

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Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me by John Sutherland review – a poisonous love

‘A victim of misogyny, she was a bit of a misogynist herself’ … Monica Jones with Philip Larkin.


Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me by John Sutherland review – a poisonous love

In thrall to Larkin’s genius: racism, drink and despair in a generous account of a tortured relationship over four decades


Blake Morrison

17 April 2021


Poor Monica Jones. She would have liked to marry Philip Larkin but he kept her at arm’s length (or the 100 miles between Hull and Leicester) for more than 30 years. An academic, she loved her subject, English literature, but failed to publish any books and, as a result, was never promoted by her university department. She dressed with flair and flamboyance but was dismissed by Larkin’s friends as “a grim old bag”, “a beast”, “frigid, drab and hysterical”, and appeared, thinly disguised, as the appalling Margaret Peel (her own middle name was Beale) in Kingsley Amis’s debut novel Lucky Jim. “I dread the whole of the rest of my life,” she wrote in her 30s, and death has done little to rescue her reputation.

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Saturday, July 7, 2018

2018, as picked by writers / Part three

 

Jon McGregor


2018, as picked by writers – part three

Surrealist artists, dogged detectives, modern lovers and spies behaving badly ... leading authors pick their best books to enjoy these holidays

Saturday 7 July 2018


Jon McGregor


People always say not to judge a book by its cover, but people are wrong. Ashleigh Young’s collection of smart, funny, insightful and unexpected essays, Can You Tolerate This? (Bloomsbury), has a bright yellow cover, making it perfect summer reading. I love it. I’ve been telling people about Lucy Wood’s short stories ever since her debut collection came out a few years ago; she’s back with another collection, The Sing of the Shore (4th Estate), and she’s better than ever. Finally, Melissa Harrison’s forthcoming All Among the Barley (Bloomsbury) is an astonishingly good evocation of rural England in the 1930s, complete with creeping fascism and the subjugation of women. It’s subtle and mesmerising and brilliantly detailed, and I’m going to lie down in a meadow and read it all over again.

Pankaj Mishra

Fiction in English from Pakistan has redeemed its promise with dazzling consistency. Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds (Bloomsbury) is a fresh marvel, describing with cool wit and steely yet tender intelligence the interlinked fates of antagonists in a forgotten war-scape – and the complicity of our own sheltered lives in remote conflicts. Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton) is a poetic and remarkably fertile exploration of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment, and what can still be done to stem its rapid deterioration.

The term neoliberalism provokes much choleric denial. But Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard) decisively establishes it as a coherent project, tracing it back to the political and intellectual synergies of the 1920s. Michelle Dean’s Sharp (Fleet), a portrait of 10 female writers and thinkers, is a bracing tribute to the life of the iconoclastic mind: a reminder, in our age of flashy hot takes, of the matchless power of sustained and elegant argument.

Blake Morrison

Warlight book cover

Kept from the world by a crazed fundamentalist father, cowed herbalist mother and violent misogynist brother, it’s a miracle Tara Westover escaped her childhood in rural Idaho. Her memoir Educated (Hutchinson) brilliantly recounts her journey towards knowledge and enlightenment; bravely, too – her family are still alive. With Rachel Cusk as with Karl Ove Knausgaard, you wonder what makes you keep turning the pages. But while he’s confessional, her narrator Faye lets other characters do the talking, giving little of herself away; Kudos completes a remarkable trilogy. The crepuscular, dreamlike, post-1945 London that Michael Ondaatje invents in his novel Warlight (Cape) continues to haunt you long after the plot itself.

Andrew Motion

Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan is the best first collection I’ve read for a long time: moving, technically adroit, clever in all the right ways, and full of brilliant small-scale effects as well as large achievements. Angela Leighton’s Hearing Things (Harvard) is as good as her previous book on poetic form – which is to say it’s terrific – and illuminates a great deal about the sound effects of poetry that cannot be disentangled from its page-sense. Rachel Cusk’s Kudos brings her enthralling trilogy to a well-judged conclusion, at once rounded and open.

Sarah Perry


Now that Terry Pratchett is gone, Stephen King is one of the only authors I buy in hardback on publication day. His latest, The Outsider (Hodder), is both a detective and a horror novel, and it gripped me to the point of checking under the bed before I went to sleep. It reminded me of what it was like to lie reading by torchlight late at night, when camping in the summer.

I’ve never been much of a reader of contemporary poetry, but I have been seduced by some of the brilliant young poets writing now, of whom Amy Key is perhaps my favourite. Her new collection, Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe), is playful, surreal and enchanting but also rooted in brutal emotional honesty. She is writer of a rare and strange magic.

I am lucky enough to have an advance proof of Mrs Gaskell and Me, the new book from the brilliantly gifted Nell Stevens: she describes it as a love letter to “her own very special, dear friend”, Mrs Gaskell, and I have it patiently waiting on my desk.

Michael Pollan

On my bedside at the moment: Go, Went, Gone (Granta, translated by Susan Bernofsky), a novel about the refugee crisis in Germany by Jenny Erpenbeck that is not only timely but masterful; Matt Walker’s illuminating review of the science of sleep and how we’re all doing it wrong: Why We Sleep (Allen Lane); The Overstory (Heinemann), Richard Powers’ weird and wonderful novel about the intricate relationships among trees and humans; and Carlo Rovelli’s mindbending The Order of Time.

Ian Rankin

Liz Nugent’s Skin Deep

Liz Nugent’s Skin Deep (Penguin) is the perfect holiday read for those who like their escapism on the darker side. If Patricia Highsmith were Irish she might well have come up with this tale of a scarred woman who taints all she touches while remaining as charismatic as she is enigmatic.

In The Smiling Man (Doubleday) Joseph Knox pulls off the “difficult second novel” with ease and considerable style. Labyrinthine Mancunian noir with the obligatory battered but dogged detective.

Ambrose Parry, The Way of All Flesh isn’t published until late-August, but it’s a rip-roaring tale of murder amid the medical experiments of 19th-century Edinburgh. The book brings both city and period to colourful life and is a joy to read. It’s a collaboration between seasoned novelist Chris Brookmyre and his wife, consultant anaesthetist Marisa Haetzman.

Irish lawyer Steve Cavanagh writes excellent courtroom thrillers set in the US. His latest, Thirteen (Orion), sees him at the top of his game. It features a serial killer who’s sitting on a jury. Terrific premise, and the resulting story doesn’t disappoint.

Sally Rooney


I recently read Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar (Faber, translated by Srinath Perur), a perfectly formed short novel about a family in India undergoing a rapid change in fortune. Published in translation last year, it’s an admirably slim book – you could read it in one sitting – and for me it conjured up a whole world.

I’d also recommend Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Portobello, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori), an exhilaratingly weird and funny Japanese novel about a long-term convenience store employee. Unsettling and totally unpredictable – my copy is now heavily underlined.

Finally, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day I spent reading Olivia Laing’s Crudo (Picador). I couldn’t put it down, and then it overwhelmed me so much I had to put it down, and then I had to pick it back up again. A beautiful, strange, intelligent novel.

Katherine Rundell

Fifteen Dogs (Serpent’s Tail) by André Alexis

My favourite book for adults this year, by some margin, has been Fifteen Dogs (Serpent’s Tail) by André Alexis. It opens with two gods having a quiet drink at The Wheat Sheaf in Toronto and debating whether, if animals had human intelligence, they would be only as unhappy, or more unhappy, than humans. It’s unhinged, wise, sharp, witty and daring. I’ve also fallen in love with Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy; her work is staggering.

In the world of children’s books, I can’t wait to read Hilary McKay’s The Skylarks’ War (Macmillan), set in the approaching shadow of the first world war. McKay couples warmth and grace with wry humour like nobody else out there.

Salman Rushdie

My recent (re-)reading includes Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Speak, Memory, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, all books that don’t need me to recommend them. I have, however, immensely enjoyed David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar (Cape) for its pitch-perfect black comedy and Jeet Thayil’s The Book of Chocolate Saints (Faber), easily the most original and formally inventive novel to come out of India in years.


THE GUARDIAN



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