Contents

March 8, 2001 • Volume 48, Number 4

LETTERS

Contributors

Geoffrey O’Brien is Editor in Chief of the Library of America. His recent works include Early Autumn and The Fall of the House of Walworth. His new book Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film 2002–2012 will be published in 2013.


W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the author of many books of poems, prose, and translations and has received both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes for poetry, among numerous other awards.

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)

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

M. F. Perutz (1914–2002) was an Austrian molecular biologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962. He is the author of Is Science Necessary?, Protein Structure, and I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier.

Pico Iyer is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of several books, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications and his most recent book is The Man Within My Head.

Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, is a longtime human rights activist and the Chair of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation in Moscow. (March 2001)

Helen Epstein is an independent consultant and writer specializing in public health in developing countries, and an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. She has advised numerous organizations, including the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, Human Rights Watch, and UNICEF. She writes frequently for various publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Granta, and is the author of The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa.

Aryeh Neier, former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, is President of the Open Society Institute. He is the author of Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights.

Diane Johnson is a novelist and critic. Her books include Lulu in Marrakechand Le Divorce. Her new book, Flyover Lives, will be published in January 2014.

Christopher de Bellaigue was born in London in 1971 and has worked as a journalist in the Middle East and South Asia since 1994. His first book, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. His latest book is Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup. He lives in Tehran with his wife and two children.

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

Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Stone at Delphi: Seamus Heaney’s Poems with Classical References, Selected and Introduced by Helen Vendler has just appeared in a limited edition. (March 2013)

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.


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.

David J. Rothman is Bernard Schoenberg Professor of Social Medicine and History at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and president of the Institute on Medicine as a Professor.

Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor, based in Rome, at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, she is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome and The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. She has also published a translation of Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture and a history of Villa Taverna, the US ambassador’s residence in Rome.