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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