Damian Grant

Damian Grant a senior lecturer in English at the University of Manchester is the author of Realism and of a study of Tobias Smollett.

Letter

Straight from the Udder

2 November 2023

John Gallagher writes that London hawkers sold local milk because ‘goods spoiled fast’ (LRB, 2 November 2023). No description of the ‘fresh’ milk drunk by Londoners in former times can give a better – or more appalled – impression than that provided by Tobias Smollett for his irascible correspondent Matthew Bramble in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). This is Bramble’s account...
Letter

Duff Poetry

11 October 1990

I know that a travesty and a transvestite tumble out of the same bed, but Danny Karlin’s hairy-legged attempt to pee on Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s feet (Letters, 8 November) can’t be let pass. There’s none so deaf as those that won’t hear. I suspect that Karlin’s ‘argument’ against Pitt-Kethley’s poems actually works the other way round: that is, because he doesn’t like them, he persuades...
Letter

Folk Hero

3 March 1988

SIR: One was grateful for Gabrielle Cox’s well-informed review of the Stalker saga which questioned the false consolation to be derived from accepting the ‘whiter than white’ John Stalker created in curious collusion between his own and the public imagination. John Stalker was the victim of an official cover-up in Northern Ireland, which disrupted both his professional and personal life. With...

An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman

Damian Grant, 7 May 1987

Douglas Dunn’s Selected Poems includes the greater part of his published poems, from Terry Street (published in 1969, and reissued with this selection) through four more volumes to the widely acclaimed Elegies (1985). Terry Street and the two following volumes, The Happier Life and Love or Nothing, were well received as plain unvarnished poems of Northern suburbia: and now the inventory of working-class clothes, foods and pastimes has a certain period interest. This is the beginning of the end of that culture mourned by Jeremy Seabrook among others:

Letter

Stalker & Co

20 November 1986

SIR: I had been going to say, in response to Mr Davies (Letters, 18 December 1986), that he overlooked one of the main points in my article about the parallel cases of Mr Stalker and the Manchester students: that I did consider Mr Stalker responsible, as Deputy Chief Constable, for any breach of discipline by officers of the Greater Manchester Police; and that I did deplore his refusal to take complaints...
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