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...

Discussing David Shorney’s reference to Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, specifically the entertainment of strangers, Howard Cooper mentions the ‘frequent creative borrowings’ of this motif in early Christianity (Letters, 26 December 2024 and 6 February 2025). Not just early Christianity. D.H. Lawrence recycles the motif for the last lines of his poem ‘Song of a Man who Has Come Through’:What...