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Contents

April 11, 1991 • Volume 38, Number 7

LETTERS

Contributors

John Ashbery is the author of several books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. His first collection, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. From 1990 until 2008 Ashbery was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggles for Poland, The Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.


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.

Jeremy Bernstein’s books include Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element and Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know, which was published in paperback in February. (May 2010)

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches and the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic.
 (January 2013)

J. H. Elliott is Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of History in the Making.

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


Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard. His books include The Marketplace of Ideas, American Studies and The Metaphysical Club.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 and emigrated to England in 1950, when he won a scholarship to University College, Oxford. He is the author of many novels, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and In a Free State, which won the Booker Prize. He has also written several nonfiction works based on his travels, including India: A Million Mutinies Now and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. He was knighted in 1990 and in 1993 was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

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.


Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad in 1951 to an aristocratic family that includes the writers Leo and Alexei Tolstoy. After completing a degree in classics at Leningrad State University, Tolstaya worked for several years at a Moscow publishing house. In the mid-1980s, she began publishing short stories in literary magazines and her first story collection established her as one of the foremost writers of the Gorbachev era. She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities. Known for her acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life, Tolstaya has also been the co-host of the Russian cultural interview television program School for Scandal. Both her novel, The Slynx and her collection of stories, White Walls, are published by NYRB Classics.

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.

Arthur Kempton, the author of Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music, is a fellow at the Institute for African-American Research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. (March 2006)

James Joll (1936–2011) was a British historian. His books include The Origins of the First World War and Europe Since 1870.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, and the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet and of the forthcoming Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist.. He is also the founder of 350.org, the global climate campaign that has been actively involved in the fight against natural gas fracking.