Lorna Scott Fox

SIR: I would like to correct the error committed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his review of Descombes’s Modern French Philosophy (LRB, 16 April) concerning my sex, which is female. However limited the clues afforded by a mere initial, it is probably a good rule never simply to assume the masculinity of translators (or of anyone else).

Katie Hickman’s melodramatic outrage betrays once more the superficial traveller, unable to accept criticism of her failure to penetrate the Mexican mask (Letters, 28 April). In this she is no worse, as I implied in my review, than the hundreds of voyagers and writers (the only exception is B. Traven) who have exploited a similarly prejudiced, exotic view of this country. Her originality resides...

Argentine society is no doubt plagued by a particularly feeble brand of machismo (anything from the novels of Manuel Puig to the current President), but the tango-strutting woman whose waist is ‘about to break’ (LRB, 14 December 1995) is getting neither ‘laid’ nor ‘killed’. She’s going to perform a flashy movement in a dance with dazzling scope for power and sensuality all round. The...

I don’t know why Ian Birchall (Letters, 5 June) thinks I was being ‘dismissive’ in calling Victor Serge’s muffled deviations from the Comintern line on Germany ‘ultra-leftist’ – nothing wrong with that in my view. But he is right to qualify the tendency. Serge, I wrote, had been sent by the Comintern to analyse the German Revolution, but what follows – ‘which he did often, from an...

In Spain, a word for ‘child’ is chaval or chavala; it’s both shorter and more grown-up in Mexico, where chavo, chava means ‘teenager’ or ‘young person’, with many colloquial uses beyond that age. Chavos banda are the stylish young gang members of Mexico City. The origin is Romany.