Michael Mason

Ruth Parkin-Gounelas’s parody (Letters, 5 September) of the new academic conformism was amusing, but a little overdone. Young academics are not this close, yet, to being the Red Guards of our intellectual life.

Ruth Parkin-Gounelas’s parody (Letters, 5 September) of the new academic conformism was amusing, but a little overdone. Young academics are not this close, yet, to being the Red Guards of our intellectual life.

If James Pierrepont Greaves’s community at Ham Common had been ‘far from Owenite’, as Jackie Letham alleges (Letters, 10 September), its appeal for such prominent Owenites as Thomas Frost, Robert Buchanan (or at least his wife) and Alexander Campbell would be inexplicable. The last of these actually lived in the community from 1842 for a couple of years, and promulgated Greavesian doctrine while...

Michael Mason writes: At no point in my review did I deny that the interplay of cognitive with ideological and political factors in the history of ideas about sexuality is, and is bound to be, horribly complex. I did say that Professor Laqueur seemed to have fallen back on a procedure in which complexity was exaggerated, rather than clarified as far as it truthfully could be. By contrast, it was he...

What a preposterous piece by John Bayley on Wordsworth and Coleridge (LRB, 7 December)! This was meant to be a review of two books on Coleridge and one on Wordsworth. It hardly mentioned the last of these, but the discussion of Coleridge was filled with and disfigured by hostility towards Wordsworth. Sometimes this was frankly potty: as in the proposal that Wordsworth’s diction is in some way out...