Michael Mason

Michael Mason writes: By inexplicably ignoring the first part of my discussion of the Cleveland affair, Dr Donovan has very seriously distorted my views. The paragraphs from which he quotes were by way of an exploration of the attitudes that may underlie the bizarre hostility with which the pediatricians and social services at Cleveland have been regarded. The unfairness of the reaction was the subject...

I was interested by the points made in the three letters in your last issue concerning my review of Dudley Miles’s book on Francis Place. David Craig has made a wrong deduction about my attitude to Wallas’s classic biography. In writing of the faint record of Place’s activity which (in the absence of the British Museum material) the historian faces, I was thinking of primary sources. And in witholding...

SIR: In the reprinting of Professor Christopher Ricks’s essay, ‘In Theory’ (LRB, 16 April 1981), in the recent anthology of pieces from the LRB (London Review of Books: Anthology One) some unfortunate errors occurred. Fifteen hundred words of Professor Ricks’s discussion of Stanley Fish’s Is there a text in this class? were omitted, and, amongst other printing errors, several instances of...

SIR: In his letter in your last issue, Yorick Wilks claims to believe that Anthony Blunt was motivated by ‘hatred for his fellows, or at least for a large proportion of them’. I cannot think that this is his considered opinion. Professor Wilks is a university teacher. He must respect evidence (although he reiterates a piece of gossip from Privite Eye), and the facts about Blunt’s actions are...