Table of Contents

Volume 29, Number 19 · December 2, 1982

Helen Vendler, American Poet

Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton

Jane Kramer, In the Garrison

Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

A Chain of Voices by André Brink

John K. Fairbank, 'Red' or 'Expert'?

Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980 by Jonathan Unger

Competitive Comrades: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China by Susan L. Shirk

China's Intellectual Dilemma: Politics and University Enrolment, 1949-1978 by Robert Taylor

Michael Wood, Beautiful and Damned

Baudelaire the Damned: A Biography by F.W.J. Hemmings

Baudelaire's Literary Criticism by Rosemary Lloyd

Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Howard

Elizabeth Hardwick, Eyewitness ARTnews

Osip Mandelstam, Two Poems from 'Tristia' (poem)

Joan Didion, El Salvador: Illusions

Gordon A. Craig, Mein liebes Tagebuch,

Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939 selection and foreword by Hermann Kesten, translated by Richard Winston, by Clara Winston

Peter G. Peterson, Social Security: The Coming Crash

Ernst Gombrich, The Art of Collecting Art

The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These Have Appeared by Joseph Alsop

Kevin Sharpe, An Unwanted Civil War?

The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42 by Graham Parry

The Royalist War Effort, 1642-1646 by Ronald Hutton

The Outbreak of the English Civil War by Anthony Fletcher

Ada Long, Surprises

Grace Abounding by Maureen Howard

Ernst Badian, Marx in the Agora

The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests by G.E.M. de Ste. Croix

Jonathan Lieberson, The Romantic Rationalist

Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl R. Popper, edited by W.W. Bartley III

Karl Popper by Anthony O'Hear

In Pursuit of Truth: Essays on the Philosophy of Karl Popper on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday edited by Paul Levinson


Letters

George Konrad, The Danger in Poland: A Letter
Elie Kedourie, Clifford Geertz, Understanding Islam
Ned Rorem, Robert Craft, Puppy Love
John A. Garraty, Catch Up
Lucy L. Bridges, Catholics
Theodore Weiss, Renee Weiss, et al. More Szymborska



Contributors

Gordon A. Craig is J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Stanford. His latest book is Politics and Culture in Modern Germany. (December 2003)

Joan Didion is the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction. (February 2008)

Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich OM was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in London on November 3, 2001, aged 92. He studied at the Theresianum and then at the Second Institute of Art History at the University of Vienna under Julius von Schlosser (1928-33). He then worked as a Research Assistant and collaborator with the museum curator and Freudian analyst Ernst Kris. He joined the Warburg Institute in London as a Research Assistant in 1936. During World War 2 he was employed by the BBC as a Radio Monitor. After the war he rejoined the Warburg Institute eventually becoming its Director in 1959. His major publications include The Story of Art (1950), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970), The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. (Also see: www.gombrich.co.uk.)

Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916) has been a frequent contributor to The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, which she helped found in 1963. Her books include the novels The Simple Truth, The Ghostly Lover, and Sleepless Nights, the essay collection A View of My Own, and The Selected Letters of William James, for which she acted as editor.

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was born and raised in St. Petersburg, where he attended the prestigious Tenishev School, before studying at the universities of St. Petersburg and Heidelberg and at the Sorbonne. Mandelstam first published his poems in Apollyon, an avant-garde magazine, in 1910, then banded together with Anna Akhmatova and Nicholas Gumilev to form the Acmeist group, which advocated an aesthetic of exact description and chiseled form, as suggested by the title of Mandelstam's first book, Stone (1913). During the Russian Revolution, Mandelstam left Leningrad for the Crimea and Georgia, and he settled in Moscow in 1922, where his second collection of poems, Tristia, appeared. Unpopular with the Soviet authorities, Mandelstam found it increasingly difficult to publish his poetry, though an edition of collected poems did come out in 1928. In 1934, after reading an epigram denouncing Stalin to friends, Mandelstam was arrested and sent into exile. He wrote furiously during these years, and his wife, Nadezhda, memorized his work in case his notebooks were destroyed or lost. (Nadezhda Mandelstam's extraordinary memoirs of life with her husband, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, published in the 1970s, later helped to bring Mandelstam a worldwide audience.)

Helen Vendler is the author, most recently, of Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. She is preparing for publication her recent Mellon Lectures, entitled Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill. (June 2008)

Michael Wood is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. (April 2008)


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