Anne Summers

Alison Jolly’s review of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother Nature (LRB, 10 August) suggests that humanists and others in dispute with sociobiologists misunderstand the sophistication of the latters’ reasoning. But their objections are based on rather more than a crude misconception of the nature/nurture dichotomy. Humanists are, in the first place, sceptical of arguments which make indiscriminate forays...

Jeffrey Frankland (Letters, 28 November) is incorrect in stating that the British Library holds neither the Hesperus Press edition of Heart of Darkness nor Elisabeth Jay’s edition of The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Both can be found in our automated catalogue – go to http://blpc.bl.uk/ and click on ‘search’.

You describe Glen Newey as a reader in politics rather than Reader in Politics (LRB, 23 January). From this, and from his cheerful pee-po-belly-bum-drawers prose style, I infer that he is a first-year undergraduate shaping up for a career as president of the students’ union. it’s not too soon for him to learn some useful lessons.First, to label a columnist more talented than yourself as ‘drek’,...

David Simpson commends the force of Jacqueline Rose’s arguments ‘not only in and for Israel but beyond’ (LRB, 23 June). It might indeed be useful to extend debates around nationalism to the rest of the globe. At the very least, we should be ready to acknowledge that the best efforts of socialists, pacifists and others over the past two centuries have established neither international institutions...

Lara Pawson seems to confuse the statement that ‘First World hospital care’ saved R.W. Johnson – which it did – with the idea that ‘First World hospital care’ always saves people suffering from necrotising fasciitis, which it does not (Letters, 27 August). That which is necessary is not always sufficient, as she must know. As for her statement that ‘he was, we assume, able to meet the...