Karl Miller – författare

Brought up by a strict Calvinist pastor, Robert Wringham believes he is one of the elect, predestined for salvation while all others - including his real father and brother - are cursed. Convinced he is indestructible and above the law, Robert commits terrible crimes under the influence of Gil-Martin - his physical double - who claims they are acting in God's name to purify the world. But does this mysterious tempter actually exist? Could he be an agent of the devil? Subversive and unsettling, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is a compelling psychological depiction of religious bigotry and the seductive effects of power on a tormented soul.

The articles in this volume cover a wide range of intellectually exciting issues, written by people who were considered at the summit of their fields of enquiry. Though the individual topics addressed are diverse, each article can be taken as representative of 'humanistic understanding' of its stated subject. The volume is the first of a series based upon lectures given under the auspices of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

These essays, as Karl Miller points out in his introduction, are 'largely about a time that is past, about the modern Scotland which began after the First World War and lasted out the second. The main tracks followed in the essays are the course of Modernism itself; what might be called the romantic survival; and the progress of Scottish Nationalism. One of their less predictable features is the prominence which it was thought necessary to give to the activities of poets - during a period when poetry has seemed to many in Britain to be of declining importance, the most doubtful of the arts.' Between them they provide a lively and coherent portrait of the age. They also provide a portrait of Edinburgh, and try to show what has become of the city since the great days of the early nineteenth century, described in Henry Cockburn's Memorials, the days when Edinburgh was Walter Scott's 'romantic town'.The contributors are Arthur Marwick, Tom Nairn, Hugh MacDiarmid, Louis Simpson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Robert Taubman, Sorley Maclean, George Mackay Brown, Muriel Spark, Alastair Reid, William McIlvanney, Charles McAra, Ronald Stevenson, Stuart Hood and Karl Miller himself, founder of the London Review of Books.

Henry Cockburn (1779-1854), a leading Scottish Whig of the nineteenth century, author of the classic Memorials of His Time, is perhaps the least-known of Scotland's famous men. 'Small, solid and genuine', in Carlyle's phrase, Cockburn gave himself to a variety of pursuits. As Advocate, Court of Session judge, orator, historian and poet, he fought for, and drafted, the Scottish Reform Bill of 1832 - with its momentous extension of the franchise - and he played a scarcely less significant part in the Victorian contest between Kirk and Judiciary. He broke with his father's principles, those of a sensible strong-minded lawyer and leading Scottish Tory, and became a 'man of sense' himself - an Edinburgh patriarch and sage, but of romantic sensibility, who would turn away from public commitments to take pleasure in the past and the pastoral seclusion of the neighbouring Pentland Hills.Karl Miller's sustained study of Cockburn, the first of its kind, was published in 1975. It makes use of manuscript materials to present a new picture of Cockburn's career and mental life, and presents him as one of a generation of thinkers and artists who succeeded to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cockburn's Millennium contains rich digressions on the outlook of the Scottish Whigs, on the world of the Edinburgh review, and on the Tory world-picture by which Cockburn and his friends were confronted and which included the genius of Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg. Cockburn is the protagonist of a work which ranges with penetration and wit over important issues of Scottish life and culture.

'This is a book about the magazines I have edited. I have written it in order to describe what they were like, and what literary journalism was like, and to do honour to the writers I worked with.' So begins Karl Miller's understated, droll and lucid retrospect of English post-war literary culture. Dark Horses is the vade mecum and memoir of an eminent literary critic and teacher, who also edited several of the most influential literary magazines of his time, and who founded the most influential literary journal of our time, the London Review of Books. It is the testament of a watchful and undeceived intelligence, of wide and sometimes surprising sympathies, as observant about football as about politics and letters. In its feeling for outsiders as well as its understanding of insiders, Dark Horses fulfills the promises of its title. 'Frank Kermode has written of "the good writing that cannot help eliminating truth from autobiography." Karl Miller comes marvellously close to bringing the two together.' Financial Times'Miller's prose is elegant, spare and unforced. He has the true art of the memoirist.' Jonathan Bate

'Miller was in his mother's womb when she left his father in London, bringing to an end a brief marriage. Rebecca's Vest treats subsequent beginnings and phases of his life: orphan-like upbringing by female relatives in the heart of Midlothian; national service; Cambridge and the start of his career in London, which was to culminate in his founding editorship of the London Review of Books ... Karl Miller is as generously sensitive to the gifts and style of others as he is savagely precise about his own shortcomings.' Mick Imlah'Like walking barefoot on sharp pebbles - and worth every memorable, searing step.' Valentine Cunningham'A dry, witty, elegant book, Rebecca's Vest stays in my mind while other books fade.' Doris Lessing'Fascinated by doubleness, the author of a highly original critical work on the subject, Miller calls himself a double man, but understates the case. There are more than two of him in there.' Clive James

This is a book about the imagining of two or more selves in one. It examines the belief in what was known to the nineteenth century as the duality of man, and deals with the double and with the variety of guises in which the double has appeared - the doppelganger, the alter ego or second self, and the modern multiple self. Doubles vigorously and wittily tracks down the later stages of a preoccupation which has haunted the solitary self from antiquity to the novels of Martin Amis, and which can be recognised in many features of the mental life and literary culture of the present time. The book's subjects include Poe, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Stevenson, Conrad, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow.'Karl Miller has brought off a notable double: he has written an academic book which deserves popular success.' Alan Massie

In his latest book of essays Karl Miller turns his attention to appreciate certain writers of the English-speaking modern world. A new ruralism has come to notice in this country, 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.