Contents

June 23, 2005 • Volume 52, Number 11

LETTERS

Contributors

Jonathan Raban’s books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. He lives in Seattle.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. His latest book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.


Peter France is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Edinburgh, the author of Politeness and Its Discontents, and the editor of The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. (June 2005)

Diane Johnson’s most recent novel is Lulu in Marrakech. (March 2012)

Elizabeth Drew, who lives in Washington, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is the author of fourteen books, including one of the first books on the role of money in modern US politics, from 1983.


David Gilmour is the author of The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, which was published in a revised and enlarged edition last year. He has written biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon. (June 2008)

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now 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. His most recent book is Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond.

Alan Ryan, the author of biographies of John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell, is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mill: The Spirit of the Age, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women. He teaches at Princeton. (December 2011)

Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863 and died there in 1933. He wrote most of his poems while employed in the Third Circle of Irrigation of the Ministry of Public Works. (June 2005)

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of six books, including How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of critical essays mostly from The New York Review of Books. He is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard.

David Hajdu, author of Lush Life and Positively 4th Street, teaches at Syracuse University and is music critic for The New Republic. (June 2005)

Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993) and the editor of New French Thought: Political Philosophy (1991). His latest book is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.

Louis Begley is a writer and retired lawyer. He has written many novels, including Wartime Lies, About Schmidt, Matters of Honor, and Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, which was published in 2009. His new novel, Schmidt Steps Back, will be published in March 2012. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres of France and served as the president of PEN American Center from 1993 to 1995. He lives in New York with his wife, Anka Muhlstein, an historian of France.

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. Parts of his essay in the Review‘s October 13, 2011 issue were drawn from his Tanner Lectures on Human Value at Stanford University, which will be published next year as Torture and the Forever War. His work can be found at markdanner.com.

John R. Searle is Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Making the Social World. (June 2011)

Lee Siegel is the author of four books, including Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce—and Why It Matters and Are You Serious: How to Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly. He is also the author of the essay “Harvard Is Burning,” just published as an e-book. He has written essays and reviews for many publications, including Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. In 2002, he received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.

Benjamin Kunkel is the author of the novel Indecision and a founding editor of n+1 magazine.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville’s novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. A Death in Summer, a novel written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, was published in July 2011.


James Fenton is a visiting fellow at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library.
 (March 2012)

Cathleen Schine is the author of several novels, including Rameau’s Niece, The Love Letter, She is Me, The New Yorkers, and The Three Weissmanns of Westport. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Richard Crampton is Professor of East European History and Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. He is the author of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, The Balkans Since the Second World War, and a number of histories of Bulgaria. (June 2005)