From a great literary critic comes a book on writers and their relationship to the countryside, including discussion of Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, Anne Tyler, and more
In this essay collection the founder of the London Review of Books 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, 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 Seamus 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.
Recenzijas
'Imbued with his usual eloquence and foresight ... his criticism attains an artistic quality of its own' Financial Times. * Financial Times * 'A new collection of essays by Karl Miller is a cause for jubilation' Independent. * Independent * 'Wide-ranging, brilliantly erudite and eccentric' Margaret Drabble, Observer. * Observer *
Acknowledgements. Foreword: Andrew O'Hagan. 'Didn't they ramble', a
poem by Seamus Heaney. Country Writers. From the Lone Shieling. McGahern's
Hard Sayings. The Passion of Alice Laidlaw. Edward and Florence. What
Happened to Seamus Heaney. Yorkshire Lad. Hot for Boswell. Cockburn's
Letters. McNeillie's Dream. Glass's Life of Gray. Carnival Scotland. Lord
Dacre Hammers the Scots. Epilimnion Re-Used. Gulleying About. Baltimore's
Honeys. Afterword. Notes. Index.
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, a Life of James Hoggart, Electric Shepherd and two volumes of autobiography, Rebecca's Vest and Dark Horses.
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