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Contents

October 11, 1990 • Volume 37, Number 15

LETTERS

Contributors

Robert M. Adams (1915-1996) was a founding editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Rutgers, Cornell and U.C.L.A. His scholarly interested ranged from Milton to Joyce, and his translations of many classic works of French literature continue to be read to this day.

Julian Barnes has written eleven novels, three books of short stories, and four collections of essays. His latest novel, The Sense of an Ending, won the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

Nicholas Lemann is Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.


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.

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) was an American geologist, biologist and historian of science. He taught at Harvard, where he was named Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, and at NYU. His last book was Punctuated Equilibrium.

Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, is a longtime human rights activist and the Chair of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation in Moscow. (March 2001)

Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. Her translations include Marina Tsvetaeva’s Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922, a volume of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s writings, Experiments for the Future; and Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel, The Slynx. Her translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik will be published in 2011.

Michael Scammell is the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography and Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.
He is Professor Emeritus of Writing and Translation at Columbia.
 (March 2013)

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) was an American economist. He taught economic history at the New School, where he was appointed Norman Thomas Professor of Economics in 1971.

Jeri Laber, Senior Advisor to Human Rights Watch, was formerly executive director of its Helsinki division. She is the author, with Barnett R. Rubin, of ‘A Nation is Dying’: Afghanistan Under the Soviets, 1979—1987. (January 1997)

Paul Kennedy, the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale, is the author and editor of fifteen books, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. His latest book is The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations. (November 2006)

Simon Leys is the pen name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. Leys’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, and other periodicals. Among his books are Chinese Shadows, The Death of Napoleon (forthcoming from NYRB Classics), Other People’s Thoughts, and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Boyer lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Femina, the Prix Guizot, and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.

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.

Ronald Steel is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, a recent fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the author of biographies of Walter Lippmann and Robert Kennedy.

Charles Rosen is a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Joan Acocella is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of Mark Morris, Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, and Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. She also edited the recent, unexpurgated Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. Her article in the May 23, 2013 issue is adapted from her introduction to a new edition of Isadora Duncan’s My Life, published in May 2013 by Liveright.