Jeremy Bernstein

Jenny Diski should know (LRB, 22 February) that Mont Cervin and the Matterhorn are one and the same: French/German. Any snow frosting the one will frost the other.

Readers of Jane Eldridge Miller’s review of Carolyn Burke’s biography of Mina Loy (LRB, 19 June) might wish to know that Loy’s daughter Fabienne, ill and nearing blindness, died – by her own hand – a few weeks ago.

I was much taken by Mary Hawthorne’s tribute to the late Maeve Brennan (LRB, 13 November). Miss Brennan was one of the first people I met when I joined the staff of the New Yorker in the early Sixties. She was as remarkable-looking as Mary Hawthorne describes and she had that wonderful Irish lilt and a very impish sense of humour. On one occasion I ran into her on 43rd Street in front of the New...

I greatly enjoyed Murray Sayle’s piece about Eric Shipton (LRB, 7 May). Some years ago I spent an evening with Shipton, who told me that on one of his Everest expeditions of the Thirties he stood at much the same spot where, as Sayle recounts, Noel Odell thought he saw Mallory and Irvine before they disappeared. Shipton saw what appeared to be two figures above him but clearly they were rocks. He...

John Banville’s review of David Cesarani’s biography of Arthur Koestler (LRB, 18 February) reminded me of something that has been nagging me since 1972, when I went to Reykjavik to cover the chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer. Koestler was there covering it for some prestigious newspaper. George Steiner was covering it for the New Yorker. I blush to say that I was covering it for...