Contents

November 19, 1998 • Volume 45, Number 18

LETTERS

Contributors

Noel Annan is the author of Leslie Stephen and Our Age, among other books. (October 1999)

John Bayley has written two books about his wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, Elegy for Iris and Iris and Her Friends. (July 2004)

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

James Fenton is a visiting fellow at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library.
 (March 2012)

Daniel J. Kevles is Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. His most recent book is The Baltimore Case.

Bernard Knox is director emeritus 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.

David Lodge is a novelist and critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, England. His novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, and Author, Author. His most recent works of criticism are Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

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.


Louis Lowenstein is the Rifkind Professor Emeritus of Finance and Law at Columbia University and the Chairman of the Coalition for the Homeless. (November 1998)

Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911. Over the course of his long and prolific career he published works in many genres, including criticism (The Captive Mind), fiction (The Issa Valley), memoir (Native Realm), and poetry (New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001). He was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He died in 2004.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

Robert L. Herbert, after a long career at Yale, is now Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Mount Holyoke. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has been named Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. Among his books are Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society, Nature’s Workshop: Renoir’s Writings on the Decorative Arts, and Seurat: Drawings and Paintings. His most recent book is Seurat and the Making of –?La Grande Jatte.–?

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist and critic with The Irish Times. His new book, Ship of Fools: How Corruption and Stupidity Killed the Celtic Tiger, will be published in the fall. (August 2009)

Simon Leys is the author of Chinese Shadows. Among his latest works are The Wreck of the Batavia, With Stendhal, and The Hall of Uselessness.
 (February 2012)

Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs.

Kenneth Roth is Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. (November 1998)

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.

Bernard Williams is Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His most recent book is Making Sense of Humanity. The article in this issue is a revised version of the Orr Lecture given in the Music Faculty of Cambridge University, May 2000. An earlier draft was given at the Nexus Institute, Tilburg, Holland. (November 2000)