Christopher Small

In common with, no doubt, many other of your readers, I have been keenly looking forward to the London Review’s reaction, in due course, to the matter of Salman Rushdie – and have been proportionately disappointed by what appears in your current issue. Robert Fisk’s ‘Diary’ (LRB, 16 March) is an interesting footnote to the affair of The Satanic Verses, but it is hardly more, even with his...

It appears to me that Jane Miller’s spirited and indignant defence of schoolteachers (LRB, 17 August) is, as counter-attack, directed less against ‘tetchy pundits’ in the universities and elsewhere than against a government which by financial and other means has made education in the proper use of English more and more difficult. Professor Pole (Letters, 28 September) now returns, with the Government,...

Michael Neve concludes his interesting article on the double in literature and psychological theory (LRB, 8 November) with an appreciative summing-up of past achievement and what seems to be a large invitation to the future: ‘Given the grandeur of much of what results from literary duality, and from the critical minds who have had the courage to keep it alive, it is worth looking forward to what...

Mark Lilla’s review of The Magus of the North, Isaiah Berlin’s essay upon Johann Georg Hamann (LRB, 6 January) makes no mention of an earlier study of Hamann by the Scottish theologian R. Gregor Smith (J.G. Hamann: A Study in Christian Existence, 1960). This seems odd, if only as a matter of routine academic courtesy; though it may be, of course, that Isaiah Berlin doesn’t mention it either....

It’s surprising that, discussing the sexual significance of zippers, and the part played by this in their eventual hold on public fancy, E.S. Turner (LRB, 6 April) doesn’t mention Brave New World (1932, rather earlier than the epoch suggested for the zipper’s arrival as ‘the tool and symbol of seduction’). Surely Huxley’s super-pneumatic Lenina, stepping alluringly from her unzipped zippicamiknicks,...