Contents

November 16, 1995 • Volume 42, Number 18

LETTERS

Contributors

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

Alfred Brendel is a pianist and the author of Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out , as well as several volumes of poetry. (October 2002)

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

Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young editor at Doubleday. In 1963 he was a founder of The New York Review and in 1979 cofounder with the late Edmund Wilson of the Library of America. In 2007 he cofounded On Demand Books. Among his many awards are the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle, and the Curtis Benjamin Award given by the American Association of Publishers for enriching the world of books.
 (February 2011)

Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is Isaiah Berlin’s editor and one of his Literary Trustees. Two new books by Berlin appeared in March 2002: Liberty, an expanded edition of Four Essays on Liberty, and Freedom and Its Betrayal. Dr. Hardy is currently working on an edition of Berlin’s letters. Also see see the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. (March 2002)

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.

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.


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)

Misha Glenny is the author of The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–1999. (July 2003)

Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British critic and literary theorist. Born on the Isle of Man, he taught at University College London, Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard. Adapted from a series of lectures given at Bryn Mawr College, Kermode’s Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction remains one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism.

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.


Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977. The translation in this issue appears in Verses and Versions, a collection of Nabokov’s translations of three centuries of Russian poetry, published this month by Harcourt. (November 2008)

Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel The Accursed. She is Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Arts and the Humanities at Princeton.


Witold Rybczynski is the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the architecture critic for Slate. His book on American building, Last Harvest, was published in 2007.

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.

Bernard Knox (1914–2010) was an English classicist. He was the first director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. Among his many books are The Heroic Temper, The Oldest Dead White European Males, and Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal. He is the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and wrote the introductions and notes for Robert Fagles’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Luc Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and Folk Photography. He has translated Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and written the introduction to George Simenon’s The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (both available as NYRB Classics). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

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.

John R. Searle is Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Making the Social World.
 (January 2013)