Damian Grant

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...

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...