Professor Karl Miller: Editor who nurtured a vast stable of writers as one of Britain’s foremost literary figures across five decades

Karl Miller was an impresario of British literary writers, one of those editors whose own talent was for finding good writers and making them give of their best in the several papers he edited, from Cambridge’s Granta, to The Spectator in its golden age, to the rival New Statesman, The Listener at its peak and then as a founder of the London Review of Books.

At each of these he gathered around him a clutch of sparky contributors and associates – Ted Hughes, Claire and Nick Tomalin and Thom Gunn at Granta; Alan Brien, Bernard Levin and Katharine Whitehorn at The Spectator; at the New Statesman VS Pritchett, Frank Kermode, Christopher Ricks, and the sometimes difficult-to-decipher William Empson; to The Listener he brought John Carey, Ian Hamilton, Clive James and Raymond Williams; and at the LRB he published everyone from Martin Amis and Hilary Mantel to Philip Larkin. Though he didn’t make his own contribution as a writer until the mid-1980s and ’90s (he said “I would like to have been more a writer of books than I have succeeded in being”), without him the intellectual life of Britain would have been greatly impoverished.

Assembling this literary entourage compensated for the family life he lacked as a child. He was born in Straiton, Midlothian, to parents who, he wrote, did not wish to remain married to each other, “or to me”, and his upbringing was left to his maternal grandmother near Edinburgh. He had a stormy relationship with his father, William, an unsuccessful artist, and cycled on Sundays to see his staunch socialist mother in nearby Gilmerton.

He said he was never “conscious of bearing my parents any ill will for not being around”, but also reported nearly coming to blows with his father – and some of those close to him blamed his occasional bad temper on resentment about his childhood. At the Old Royal High School on Calton Hill he was “a hard-working scholarship boy, a dux, a valedictory orator, a poet” and resolved “in a Scottish way, to get on.”

His grandmother’s death in 1948 was a blow. He relished telling how, when he came across the word “brothel” while reading Scott, she defined it as somewhere “bad people went to dance.” His schooling left him unprepared for National Service in the late 1940s, when he got 0/20 for reassembling a bicycle pump, but he embraced the working-class ethos of the non-commissioned soldier and remained all his life a ferocious football fan. He found his feet with the British Forces Network in Hamburg.

By 1951 he was reading English under FR Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge. Though Leavis exerted an influence Miller did not succumb to his spell. He would never have allowed a protégé to accept the editorship of Granta, and anyway the Leavisites claimed that Miller had begun to call people “darling”, and though this habit probably came from his predecessor as editor, Mark Boxer, it might also have had something to do with his election as a Cambridge Apostle. Unlikely as it seems that this non-public school, football-mad Scottish lad would be recruited by the then-130-year-old Cambridge Conversazione Society (its formal name), Miller was welcomed by the likes of EM Forster, GE Moore, Eric Hobsbawm and joined his more contemporary Apostles, Noel Annan, Neal Ascherson and Jonathan Miller.

With a first in the English tripos, Miller began doing research on Scottish literature, spending a year at Harvard, where the English department was just becoming alert to the New Criticism, and someone who’d studied under Leavis was welcome. In fact, he had defected from the Leavisite position, though he still hewed to the discipline of close reading. “I was disliked by members of the London literary world as a Leavisite zealot,” he recalled, “and disliked by Leavisite zealots as a renegade who had sold out to the London literary world.”

Not having had a family as a child, Miller soon made up for it. In 1956 he married Jane Elisabeth Collet, the same year his fellow-Apostle Jonathan Miller married her sister, Rachel, and they started a family with two sons, Daniel and Sam followed by a daughter, Georgia.

A post as Assistant Principal at the Treasury 1956-57 was not very successful, nor did Miller stay on as a TV producer at the BBC the following year; however he soon found his metier as literary editor of The Spectator from 1958-61, under the benign editorships of Ian Gilmour and Brian Inglis. Katharine Whitehorn remembered that Alan Brien and Bernard Levin “often found it convenient to meet in Karl’s office, which was between theirs, Karl’s impotent fury at their antics being half the fun.”

After three years of amiable squabbling Miller decamped to the opposition New Statesman in 1961, again as literary editor, his bosses being first John Freeman, then Paul Johnson. As he was hostile to what he called “consensus reviewing,” his relationship with Johnson got prickly, as he felt Johnson was edging towards more popular content rather than embracing the specialist interests of NS readers.

This led in 1967 to a confrontation over one of William Empson’s more arcane contributions, and Miller resigned. John Sutherland says that, as a goodwill gesture, Johnson gave Miller a golden goodbye of £3,000 (worth well over 10 times that today), but Miller contemptuously tore up the cheque. Hired to edit The Listener, Miller pioneered serious TV reviewing.

In 1974, with no higher degree and no learned articles or book to his credit, Miller became Lord Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London, where his fellow Apostle Noel Annan was Provost. Edgy questions were asked by people such as AS Byatt, a lecturer; but this was a good appointment. Miller wrote several books, ran the department smoothly for 17 years, steered it through the years of cuts and supervised some first-rate students.

From 1979-92 he also edited and co-edited (with Mary Kay Wilmers) the London Review of Books, which began as a supplement to the New York Review of Books when the TLS ceased publication for 11 months, but soon flourished independently. Miller’s own writing style is distinctive, varying between colloquial and deeply serious, flowing and unadorned, scholarly (Electric Shepherd, 2003, a study of James Hogg begun half a century earlier) and autobiographical (Rebecca’s Vest, 1994, and Dark Horses, 1998).

Karl Fergus Connor Miller, writer, editor and academic: born Straiton, Midlothian 2 August 1931; married 1956 Jane Elisabeth Collet (one daughter, two sons); died London 24 September 2014.