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Contents

December 20, 2001 • Volume 48, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

Daniel Benjamin is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He served on the National Security Council staff between 1994 and 1999. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon’s book on religously motivated terrorism will be published next year. (December 2001)

Steven Simon is assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He served on the National Security Council staff between 1994 and 1999. Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin’s book on religously motivated terrorism will be published next year. (December 2001)

Christopher Jencks is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard. He is working on a book about the social and political consequences of growing inequality. (September 2007)

Joseph Lelyveld is a former correspondent and Editor of The New York Times. His latest book is Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India.

 (June 2013)

Charles Hope was Director of the Warburg Institute, London, from 2001 to 2010. He is the author of Titian.


Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s recent works include Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 was published in March 2013.

Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania. 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.

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.

Tim Judah has written widely on foreign affairs. He reports on the Balkans for The Economist and its online column Eastern Approaches. He is the author of books about the region and a biography of Abebe Bikila, the first black African to win a gold medal at the Olympics.
 (May 2012)

Brad Leithauser is a novelist, poet, and essayist. He lives in Massachusetts.

Matthew Meselson is Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard. He is engaged in research on molecular genetics and evolution. (December 2001)

J. M. Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

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

John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003) was a novelist, screenwriter and critic. His final novel is entitled Nothing Lost.

Larry McMurtry lives in Archer City, Texas. His novels include The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove (winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), Folly and Gloryand Rhino Ranch. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West and, most recently, Custer.

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

Thomas Flanagan (1923–2002), the grandson of Irish immigrants, grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he ran the school newspaper with his friend Truman Capote. Flanagan attended Amherst College (with a two-year hiatus to serve in the Pacific Fleet) and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied under Lionel Trilling while also writing stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In 1959, he published an important scholarly work, The Irish Novelists, 1800 to 1850, and the next year he moved to Berkeley, where he was to teach English and Irish literature at the University of California for many years. In 1978 he took up a post at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, from which he retired in 1996. Flanagan and his wife Jean made annual trips to Ireland, where he struck up friendships with many writers, including Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney, whom he in turn helped bring to the United States. His intimate knowledge of Ireland’s history and literature also helped to inspire his trilogy of historical novels, starting with The Year of the French (1979, winner of the National Critics’ Circle award for fiction) and continuing with The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994). Flanagan was a frequent contributor to many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Kenyon Review. A collection of his essays, There You Are: Writing on Irish and American Literature and History, is also published by New York Review Books.

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.

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.

James Fenton is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, Fenton was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2007 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

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.

William H. McNeill is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir and Summers Long Ago: On Grandfather’s Farm and in Grandmother’s Kitchen, published by the Berkshire Publishing Group. His most recent publication, as editor, is the second edition of the Encyclopedia of World History.

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.

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.

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)

Martin Malia is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of Russia Under Western Eyes, from the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum. (November 2001)