Contents

May 29, 1986 • Volume 33, Number 9

LETTERS

Contributors

Gabriele Annan is a book and film critic living in London. (March 2006)

Noel Annan (1916–2000) was a British military intelligence officer and scholar of European history. His works include Leslie Stephen and Our Age, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany, and The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Political Thought.

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author of many books, including The Magic Lantern, an eyewitness account of the velvet revolutions of 1989. His most recent book is Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name. He is currently leading an Oxford University 
research project for the discussion of global free speech norms (www.freespeechdebate.com) and working on a book about free speech.

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and one of the most influential critics of her generation. Her books include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and The Volcano Lover.

Rose B. Styron is a poet, journalist and human rights activist. She is the author of By Vineyard Light, a collection of poems centered on Martha’s Vineyard, where she and her husband, writer William Styron, spent extended summers. Her other books include From Summer to Summer, Thieves’ Afternoon and Modern Russian Poetry.

Frederick C. Crews is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays.

Charles Hope was Director of the Warburg Institute, London, from 2001 to 2010. He is the author of Titian.


Alfred Kazin (1915–1998) was a writer and teacher. Among his books are On Native Grounds, a study of American literature from Howells to Faulkner, and the memoirs A Walker in the Cityand New York Jew. In 1996, he received the first Lifetime Award in Literary Criticism from the Truman Capote Literary Trust.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. His books include Murderer in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and the novel The China Lover. His book Year Zero: A History of 1945 will be published in September 2013.

Noam Chomsky is an Institute Professor and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at MIT.

Richard A. Falk is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Theodore H. Draper (1912–2006) was an American historian. Educated at City College, he wrote influential studies of the American Communist Party, the Cuban Revolution and the Iran-Contra Affair. Draper was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 1990 recipient of the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association.

Edward Mortimer was until 2006 the Director of Communications in the Executive Office of the United Nations Secretary-General. He is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Senior Vice President and Chief Program Officer at the Salzburg Global Seminar. (April 2008)

Leszek Kołakowski was professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw until March 1968 when he was formally expelled for political reasons. He was later a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He was the author of several books, including Main Currents in Marxism. The article in this issue will appear in the collection of essays Is God Happy?, to be published in February by Basic Books. He died in 2009. (December 2012)

Aryeh Neier, former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, is President of the Open Society Institute. He is the author of Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

John Thompson is an English sociologist. He has published several studies of the media and communication in modern societies, including The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Mediaand Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age.