John Murray

SIR: Michael Wilding’s review of Isaac Singer’s The Image, and Other Stories starts interestingly enough, but the latter half, in which he discusses Singer’s attitude towards sex, seems to me one of the feeblest examples of precious as-if-but-far-from-really liberal analysis yet to be offered by an academic – in this case, an academic who, as I see from your biographical columns, doubles as...

SIR: I can sympathise with anyone asked to review an anthology of stories by 14 different authors, but I think Mr Horne might have made a better job of New Stories 8 (LRB, 21 July) if he had resisted the kind of micro-textual ploughing that led him into a. creating inferential mountains out of textual molehills, and b. many of the literary faults which he so eagerly spies in various of the anthology...