Nicolas Walter

You often give space to academic critics like John Sutherland to complain about the hard time academic critics are having in Great Britain. Now you give space to an academic critic like Elaine Showalter to complain about the hard time academic critics are having in the United States (LRB, 9 February). Could you give some space to the question whether academic critics should have anything but a hard...

It is good to know from Boris Ford’s letter (Letters, 26 May) that the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a representative of the Archbishop of Westminster do not identify with the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s position on matters of blasphemy; though surely no one imagined that they did just because Christopher Hitchens said so.The Chief Rabbi says that ‘even a fully fledged case of blasphemy...

Jenny Turner (LRB, 13 May) describes Lord Horror (1990) as ‘the now banned British comic book’. For one thing, David Britton’s work isn’t a comic book but a fantasy novel consisting of eighty thousand words of continuous narrative without a single illustration, even on the cover. For another thing, it isn’t now banned, since the destruction order was reversed on appeal. What she presumably...

Frank Kermode’s review of A.D. Nuttall’s Openings refers to ‘the Red King’s advice to Alice’. The advice to ‘begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop’ is given not by the Red King to Alice (in Through the Looking Glass) but by the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit (in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).

Readers of my review of Peter Marshall’s Demanding the impossible (LRB, 27 February) should know that it was so drastically and clumsily cut as to be a travesty of what I actually wrote.