Michael Neve

I am sure Alan Tyson told the following joke to a lot of people but his being recalled as ‘good value’ by Alan Bennett (LRB, 25 January) prompts me to record it here. Booming, sweating and joking away at an All Souls dinner, Tyson was being quizzed in a pretty dull way by a fellow guest as to what it was ‘really like’ to have translated Freud, be a practising psychoanalyst, and whether he thought...

Michael Neve writes: A group of mainly Jewish historians of genetics is counterpoised here with ancient, presumably Anglo-Saxon, scientists. Perhaps this is what Jean Bone means by ‘nativism’.

Michael Neve writes: The problem facing a reviewer of E.M. Thornton’s book is that of imagining what drives her to unite a range of individuals and movements under a single explanatory device, in order to accuse them. This is true, albeit mildly, of William Halsted (whose surname she continually misspells, in book and letter) and true also, in a more violent way, of her account of Breuer and Freud....

SIR: It appears from Rosalind Mitchison’s account in your last issue of Patricia James’s new biography of Malthus that one of the book’s strengths is its portrayal of Malthus’s ability to change his mind (LRB, 25 October). We are asked to see the producer of a ‘chilling’ social theory as being prepared to alter his positions with ease, as ‘someone who saw the subject as a field not for...