James MacGibbon

SIR: In her generous review of Jean MacGibbon’s memoir, I meant to marry him, Gabriele Annan (LRB, 7 June) quotes Philip Toynbee’s lewd send-up of the Horlicks slogan, ‘Masturbation, not night starvation,’ and adds (delightfully) that the Communist Party version was ‘Masturbation, not mass starvation.’ There never was such an official CP slogan. Only middle-class members in the Thirties...

SIR: In his review of Kiss of the Spider Woman Nicholas Spice (LRB, 6 March) makes an interesting point about the little boy’s difficulty in breaking ‘the taboo on tenderness’ when it came to uttering the word ‘breast’. This recalled a review by Brigid Brophy of Melanie Klein’s Our Adult World, many years ago in the New Statesman (7 March 1963). She opened her piece with a ribald reference...

SIR: V.G. Kiernan’s contribution on treason (LRB, 25 June) states succinctly something that has long needed saying. When the spy-book boom was reaching its height A.J.P. Taylor wrote that it seemed to him these left-wing spies had not much of importance to tell. It is the traitors of the Right – Lord Halifax, the then Foreign Secretary, hobnobbing with Goering in the late Thirties, Ribbentrop’s...

John Bayley’s review of Livia Veneziani’s Memoir of Italo Svevo (LRB, 27 July) was a reminder of how slow the British public can be in recognising foreign literature. Svevo’s masterpiece’, The Confessions of Zeno, although it had immediate success in Italy and, only a little later, in France, had to wait much longer in this country. The English translation, published by Putnam in 1930, must...

Henry Reed’s many friends and admirers must all be obliged to Jon Stallworthy for his concise biography of Henry (LRB, 12 September) and for ‘L’Envoi’ (LRB, 12 September). He mentions the poet’s ‘staggering memory’. Here is an example. Henry, knowing he needed some kind of psychiatric help, had read and admired the works of Melanie Klein (‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ was the felicitous...