Contents

December 21, 1989 • Volume 36, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

István Deák is Seth Low Professor Emeritus at Columbia. He is the author, with Jan Gross and Tony Judt, of The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath.

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.

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

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

Rosemary Dinnage’s books include The Ruffian on the Stair, One to One: Experiences of Psychotherapy, and Annie Besant.

R. J. W. Evans is a Fellow of Oriel College and Regius Professor of History Emeritus at Oxford. His books include Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe, c. 1683–1867. (July 2012)

Peter B. Reddaway is Professor Emeritus of Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

John Gross (1935–2011) was an English editor and critic. From 1974 to 1981, he was editor of The Times Literary Supplement; he also served as senior book editor and critic at The New York Times. His memoir, A Double Thread, was published in 2001.

Anthony Hecht’sCollected Later Poems and Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry were published in 2003. He died on October 20. (December 2004)

C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999) was a historian of the American South. He taught at Johns Hopkins and at Yale, where he was named the Sterling Professor of History. His books include Mary Chesnut’s Civil War and The Old World’s New World.

Daniel J. Kevles is Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale. His recent works include The Baltimore Case and he is currently completing a history of intellectual property in plants, animals, and people.


Robert O. Paxton, Mellon Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Columbia, is a lifelong birder. He is a former president of the Linnaean Society of New York and a regional editor of North American Birds magazine.
 He is the author of The Anatomy of Fascism, among other works.


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.

John Weightman (1915–2004) was a critic and literary scholar. After working as a translator and announcer for the BBC French service, Weightman turned to the study of French literature. He taught at King’s College London and the University of London. His books include The Concept of the Avant-Gardeand The Cat Sat on the Mat: Language and the Absurd.

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.

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.

Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and former vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, was expelled from the Communist Party of China in 1987. He was granted asylum at the US embassy in Beijing before leaving the country in 1990. He is the 1989 recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and is a professor of physics at the University of Arizona. (November 2011)

Orville Schell is the former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US–China Relations at the Asia Society in New York City. (May 2010)