Nicolas Walter

SIR: Richard Holmes remarks in his review of Paul Dawson’s book on Shelley’s politics (LRB, 16 October) that ‘Dawson suggests an intriguing new source’ for Shelley’s famous phrase about ‘unacknowledged legislators’ in ‘Godwin’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1804)’. This may be intriguing, but is not new. It is 34 years since George Woodcock remarked in his biography of Godwin that the...

SIR: John Dunn’s review of the first batch of ‘Past Masters’ (LRB, 22 May) contains some ill-humoured and ill-informed sneers at Humphrey Carpenter’s volume on Jesus. Among these is the suggestion that a writer about Jesus should decide whether he is divine and must make a judgment about ‘who he thought he was and what he thought he was doing’, and that the ‘indispensable’ approach...