Contents

May 6, 1999 • Volume 46, Number 8

LETTERS

Contributors

Noel Annan (1916–2000) was a British military intelligence officer and scholar of European history. His works include Leslie Stephen and Our Age, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany, and The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Political Thought.

Roger Shattuck (1923–2005) was an American writer and scholar of French culture. He taught at Harvard, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia, and Boston University, where he was named University Professor. His books includeForbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.

Jasper Griffin is Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. His books include Homer on Life and Death.

Tim Parks, a novelist, essayist, and translator, is Associate Professor of Literature and Translation at IULM University in Milan. His books include Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing and The Server.

William Pfaff’s latest book is The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy.
 (June 2013)

Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University, England. His latest book is Keynes: The Return of the Master. Felix Martin, an economist at Thames River Capital LLP, worked at the World Bank for two stretches between 1998 and 2008. He was formerly an executive board member and analyst at the European Stability Initiative.
 www.skidelskyr.com. (April 2011)

Geoffrey O’Brien is Editor in Chief of the Library of America. His recent works include Early Autumn, The Fall of the House of Walworth and Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film 2002–2012 .

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine short story writer, poet, and essayist. His fiction, which drew on his interest in mathematics and detective stories, made him one of the influential writers of the twentieth century. English-language anthologies of his stories include Ficciones, The Aleph, and Labyrinths.

Alastair Reid is a poet, a prose chronicler, a translator, and a traveler. Born in Scotland, he came to the United States in the early 1950s, began publishing his poems in The New Yorker in 1951, and for the next fifty-odd years was a traveling correspondent for that magazine. Having lived in both Spain and Latin America for long spells, he has been a constant translator of poetry from the Spanish language, in particular the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. He has published more than forty books, among them a wordbook for children, Ounce Dice Trice, with drawings by Ben Shahn. Most recently, in 2008, he published in the U.K. two career-spanning volumes, Outside In: Selected Prose and Inside Out: Selected Poetry and Translations. The substance of Supposing… e gleaned from the many children who have influenced him, to all of whom he owes and dedicates the text.

Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and the author, with Andrew Meltzoff, of Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Her new book, written with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl, is The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains and How Children Learn, which will be published in September. (May 1999)

George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor of US History Emeritus at Stanford. His recent books include Racism: A Short History and Not Just Black and White, a collection co-edited with Nancy Foner.

Robert M. Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, won the 1987 Nobel Prize in economics. His most recent book is Work and Welfare. (May 2009)

Brian Urquhart is a former Undersecretary-General of the United Nations. His books include Hammarskjöld, A Life in Peace and War, and Ralph Bunche: An American Life. His article in this issue draws on his essay in Tyringham Topics.
 (February 2013)

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.

Gordon A. Craig (1913–2005) was a Scottish-American historian of Germany. He taught at both Princeton and Stanford, where he was named the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities in 1979.

Robert Craft is a conductor and writer. Craft’s close working friendship with Igor Stravinsky is the subject of his memoir, An Improbable Life. In 2002 he was awarded the International Prix du Disque at the Cannes Music Festival.

Mark Danner is the author, most recently, of Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. He is Chancellor’s Professor of English, Journalism and Politics at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities at Bard College and is currently teaching at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. His book Torture and the Forever War will be published in the spring of 2013. His writing and other work can be found at markdanner.com.