Contents

March 17, 1988 • Volume 35, Number 4

LETTERS

Contributors

Philip Gossett is the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. His reconstruction of Gustavo III, the original version of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, had its première at the Göteborg Opera in Sweden this past September. (March 2003)

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) was an American diplomat, political scientist and historian. He is best known for his role in shaping US foreign policy during the Cold War and, in particular, for the doctrine of containment. Kennan was Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and served as Ambassador to the USSR in 1952 and as Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963. His books include At a Century’s Ending and An American Family.

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His study of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His latest book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, was published in February 2013.

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.

Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009) was a British philosopher. First outlined in The Uses of Argument, his model for analyzing arguments has had a lasting influence on fields as diverse as law, computer science and communications theory. Toulmin’s other works include The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning and Return to Reason.

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) was a Russian poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad, Brodsky moved to the United States when he was exiled from Russia in 1972. His poetry collections include A Part of Speech andTo Urania; his essay collections include Less Than One, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Watermark. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He served as US Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992.

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was a political philosopher and historian of ideas. Born in Riga, he moved in 1917 with his family to Petrograd, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution. In 1921 he emigrated to England. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he was later appointed Professor of Social and Political Theory. He served as the first president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and as president of the British Academy.