Contents

May 28, 1998 • Volume 45, Number 9

LETTERS

Contributors

Robert Craft was awarded the International Prix du Disque at the Cannes Music Festival for 2002.(May 2002)

Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), and A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2010). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

John Gregory Dunne’s new novel, Nothing Lost, will be published in May. (January 2004)

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for the Humanities. His latest book is This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s, published last year. (April 2004)

Geraldine Norman was for many years Sale Room Correspondent of The Times of London. She is the author of The Sale of Works of Art, The Fake’s Progress (with Tom Keating and Frank Norman), and, most recently, The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum. (February 1998)

Richard Jenkyns, a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, is Professor of the Classical Tradition at Oxford. His most recent book is Virgil’s Experience.(November 2001)

Enrique Krauze is the author of Mexico: Biography of Power. He is Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Letras Libres and was, for twenty years, Deputy Editor of Vuelta, whose editor was Octavio Paz. (December 2000)

John Leonard writes on books every month for Harper’s and on television every week for New York magazine. (June 2007)

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. His latest book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.


Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading. His books include The Singing Neanderthals and The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science.
 (October 2009)

Howard Gardner teaches psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent book, with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, is Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet. (April 2002)

Jonathan Spence is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. Among his books are The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, The Death of Woman Wang, and Return to Dragon Mountain. (December 2011)

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of Liberal Studies at the New School.

Jean Starobinski is Professor Emeritus of French literature at the University of Geneva. Blessings in Disguise and Largesse are among his works in English. A translation of his recent Action et réaction is to appear later this year. (May 2003)

Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich OM was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in London on November 3, 2001, aged 92. He studied at the Theresianum and then at the Second Institute of Art History at the University of Vienna under Julius von Schlosser (1928-33). He then worked as a Research Assistant and collaborator with the museum curator and Freudian analyst Ernst Kris. He joined the Warburg Institute in London as a Research Assistant in 1936. During World War 2 he was employed by the BBC as a Radio Monitor. After the war he rejoined the Warburg Institute eventually becoming its Director in 1959. His major publications include The Story of Art (1950), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970), The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. (Also see: www.gombrich.co.uk.)

Warren Zimmermann, a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University, was US Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1992. A revised edition of his book, Origins of a Catastrophe:Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers, has just been published in paperback. (June 1999)

Theodore Draper’s books include The Roots of American Communism and A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution. He is at work on a book about the nineteenth century in the US. (September 1999)

Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the George Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His forthcoming book is On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.
 (September 2009)