Contents

September 21, 2000 • Volume 47, Number 14

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

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.

Gabriele Annan is a book and film critic living in London. (March 2006)

Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the winner of the 2012 Philosophical Book Award (Hannover) for his most recent book, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.

Jonathan Mirsky, a journalist and historian of China, is the former East Asia Editor of The Times of London.
 (May 2013)

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

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a British-American journalist and social critic. Known for his confrontational style and contrarian views on a range of social issues, Hitchens was a frequent contributor to The Nation, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. Hitchens recounts his struggle with esophageal cancer in Mortality, which was published in 2012.

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.

Pankaj Mishra lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Guardian. Mishra’s recent books include Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia.

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.

John Ryle is Chair of the Rift Valley Institute, a network of regional specialists working in East and Northeast Africa. (August 2004)

Robin Robertson is from the northeast coast of Scotland. His fifth collection of poetry will be published next year. (June 2012)

Viktor Erofeyev is the author of Russian Beauty, a novel, and the editor of The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing. He lives in Moscow. (March 2001)

Israel Rosenfield and Edward B. Ziff’s most recent book is DNA: A Graphic Guide to the Molecule That Shook the World. They are completing a book about the brain. Rosenfield is also completing a graphic novel illustrated by Fiammetta Ghedini. (June 2012)

A. O. Scott is a film critic at The New York Times and the former Sunday book critic for Newsday. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Slate, and many other publications.

Tom Stoppard’s most recent play, The Invention of Love, will have its first American productions in January at the American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco, and in February at the Wilma Theater, Philadelphia. (September 1999)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of the collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, a translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy, and a study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. He teaches at Bard College.

Tony Judt (1948–2010) was the founder and director of the Remarque Institute at NYU and the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ill Fares the Land, and The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century, among other books.

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.

Whitney Balliett’s most recent book is Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954—2001 (August 2003).

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

J. S. Marcus’s most recent novel is The Captain’s Fire. He is currently a fellow at the Santa Maddalena Foundation, near Florence. (April 2001)

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)

Benjamin Demott is Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Amherst. His most recent book is Junk Politics: The Trashing of the American Mind. (May 2005)

Elaine Scarry is the author of On Beauty and Being Just and recently received the Truman Capote Prize for Dreaming by the Book. She teaches at Harvard, where she is completing a project on war and the social contract. (October 2000)