Alexander Zevin

Stefan Collini is troubled by ‘two problematic features’ in my history of the Economist (LRB, 6 February). First, claiming that I ‘arraign figures in the past for failing to live up to the most progressive standards of the present’, he cites my treatment of the banker-editor Walter Bagehot. In leaping to defend this ‘teasing, playful writer’ who was ‘no zealot for any cause’, Collini...

Patrick Cockburn mentions Bakunin’s dictum to ‘beware of small states’ to help explain why Israel and the US, and before them Britain and France, ought to have been wary about meddling in the affairs of their more diminutive victims – in this case, Lebanon (LRB, 5 August). The clearest example of the risks involved is not, however, to be found in a precipitate act of aggression, but rather...