George Hyde

Reports from Albania tend to be sneering and/or adorned with grainy photographs of poverty. The Albanian people, who have had a lot to put up with, are now facing new kinds of exploitation. At least Matt Frei (LRB, 14 May) noticed the spectacular and unspoilt coastline’ (long may it remain so!). Maybe next time he’ll visit (for instance) Tirana University, with its well-equipped new British Resource...

At a recent reunion of writers associated with Essex University, Natan Zach paid tribute to Donald Davie’s dignified conduct during the political upheavals of the Sixties. Deeply out of sympathy with events he could make no sense of, Davie turned away to, among other things, a postgraduate programme in literary translation, his brainchild, from which he sought an image of his own urbane Europeanism....

Dr Holmes’s letter (Letters, 27 October) was helpful, and pretty accurate, I think. I would just like to append a few observations. Freud is on record as saying that the most difficult patients were the ‘so-called intellectuals’, because with them ‘the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing.’ Maybe; no one, at all events, should be called upon/allowed to make any important, and...