Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSS

Contents

March 12, 1970 • Volume 14, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

Raymond Carr was Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and has written extensively on modern Spanish history. (April 2003)

Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863 and died there in 1933. He wrote most of his poems while employed in the Third Circle of Irrigation of the Ministry of Public Works. (June 2005)

Edmund Keeley is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English Emeritus at Princeton. His latest books are Borderlines: A Memoir and the novel Some Wine for Remembrance. (November 2007)

Frederick Crews is a fellow of the Institute for Science in Medicine. His most recent book is Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays. (October 2011)

Denis Donoghue is University Professor at NYU, where he holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters. He is the author of The Practice of Reading, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, and, most recently, The American Classics. (October 2006)

Theodore Draper’s books include The Roots of American Communism and A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution. He is at work on a book about the nineteenth century in the US. (September 1999)

M. I. Finley (1912-1986), the son of Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzellenbogen, was born in New York City. He graduated from Syracuse University at the age of fifteen and received an MA in public law from Columbia, before turning to the study of ancient history. During the Thirties Finley taught at Columbia and City College and developed an interest in the sociology of the ancient world that was shaped in part by his association with members of the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America. In 1952, when he was teaching at Rutgers, Finley was summoned before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to answer, invoking the Fifth Amendment; by the end of the year he had been fired from the university by a unanimous vote of its trustees. Unable to find work in the US, Finley moved to England, where he taught for many years at Cambridge, helping to redirect the focus of classical education from a narrow emphasis on philology to a wider concern with culture, economics, and society. He became a British subject in 1962 and was knighted in 1979. Among Finley’s best-known works are The Ancient Economy, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, and The World of Odysseus.

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.)

Murray Kempton (1917-1997) was a columnist for Newsday, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events and The Briar Patch, as well as Part of Our Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

Roger Shattuck is the author of Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. He has most recently edited new editions of two books by Helen Keller. He is University Professor Emeritus at Boston University. (May 2005)