Contents

October 23, 1986 • Volume 33, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

John Bayley is a critic and novelist. His books include Elegy for Iris and The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature.

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.

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.

Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford. He is the author of Dostoyevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881. (June 2008)

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) was a Canadian economist and politician. He taught at Princeton and Harvard. His works include The Affluent Society, The Age of Uncertainty and Economics and the Public Purpose. Galbraith’s many honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Lomonosov Gold Medal, the Order of Canada, and the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award.

Christopher Hill (1912–2003) was an English historian. Educated at Oxford, Hill taught at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire as well as Oxford, where he was elected Master of Balliol College. His books include Puritanism and Revolution,Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, and The World Turned Upside Down.

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) was an art critic and television writer. In the award-winning documentary series, The Shock of The New, Hughes recounted the development of modern art since the Impressionists; in The Fatal Shore, he explored the history of his native Australia. Hughes’s memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, was published in 2006.

Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the winner of the 2012 Philosophical Book Award (Hannover) for his most recent book, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.

Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of ten books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars, and Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. His latest book, Hallucinations, was published in November 2012.


Leonard Thompson is Charles J. Stillé Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. His books include The Political Mythology of Apartheid and A History of South Africa. (May 1998)

Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Stone at Delphi: Seamus Heaney’s Poems with Classical References, Selected and Introduced by Helen Vendler has just appeared in a limited edition. (March 2013)

Howard Gardner teaches psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent book, with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, is Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet. (April 2002)