Contents

August 11, 2005 • Volume 52, Number 13

LETTERS

Contributors

Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham Resources Group, which has worked in Iraq. His new book, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened Americaå?s Enemies, has just been released. (October 2008)

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.

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.


John Gray is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. Among his recent books are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, and The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. His latest book, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, will be published in June 2013.

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954 in Gloucestershire, England, and attended Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of the novels The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Spell, The Line of Beauty, as well as of a translation of the play Bajazet by Racine. A former staff member at The Times Literary Supplement, Hollinghurst is a frequent contributor to that and other publications, including The Guardian. Hollinghurst’s fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 and his fifth novel, The Stranger’s Child, was published last October. He lives in London.

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.

Sherwin B. Nuland is Clinical Professor of Surgery and a Fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale. He is the author of How We Die, which won the National Book Award in 1994, and Lost in America. (December 2005)

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.

Tim Flannery is Panasonic Professor of Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University in Sydney. His book Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific will be published this month. (November 2012)

Hilary Spurling second volume of her two-volume life of Matisse will be published in the US in September. She is also the author of Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett and The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell. The article in this issue is based on a lecture at the National Gallery, London. (August 2005)

Lorrie Moore is the Distinguished Writer in Residence for the 2013 spring semester at NYU.

 (February 2013)

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)

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)

Norman Rush was raised in Oakland, California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife Elsa, he lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. They now reside in Rockland County, New York. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986, and his first novel, Mating, the recipient of the National Book Award, was published in 1991. Mortals is his second novel. A new novel, Subtle Bodies, will be published in 2013.


Michael Kimmelman is chief architecture critic of The New York Times, a 2012 Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale, and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
 (April 2012)

Max Rodenbeck is The Economist’s Mideast Correspondent. He lives in Cairo. (May 2013)

Caroline Moorehead’s new book, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France, will be published in November. (October 2011)

Ahdaf Soueif is a novelist and a writer on political and cultural affairs. Her latest novel, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. She was born in Egypt and lives in Cairo and London.

Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955 he co-founded The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Executioner’s Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize; Harlot’s Ghost; Oswald’s Tale; The Gospel According to the Son; and The Castle in the Forest.

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.

Joan Didion is the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.

Thomas Frank is editor of The Baffler magazine and author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool. His essay in this issue is based on the afterword to the paperback edition of his most recent book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? , which will be published in May. (May 2005)