Paul Seabright

SIR: I have to report that, in spite of Richard Rorty’s valiant efforts, Descartes’s malicious demon is alive and well and living in Bedford Square. In my review of Consequences of Pragmatism (LRB, 16 June), I quoted Rorty’s claims that the realist confuses two views, and wrote that I doubted ‘whether the most rampant realist would assent to such palpable nonsense as 2’. Somehow ‘2’ got...

Paul Seabright writes: n the light of the fact that Professor Grosskurth and I were supplied by the Melanie Klein Trust with different versions of the Autobiography, I unreservedly withdraw my remarks about misquotation. The Trust did not inform me of the discrepancy, and by telling me that the fragment had not been published because it ‘would need a lot of editing’, implied that it had not previously...

John Lanchester’s article (LRB, 11 July) about serial killers made particularly interesting reading in the light of Isabel Hilton’s piece in the same issue about what she called ‘the criminal underside of Reagan’s Central America policy’. As Amnesty International routinely reminds us, armies, police forces and secret services around the world employ serial killers in large numbers. It might...

John Lanchester’s article (LRB, 11 July) about serial killers made particularly interesting reading in the light of Isabel Hilton’s piece in the same issue about what she called ‘the criminal underside of Reagan’s Central America policy’. As Amnesty International routinely reminds us, armies, police forces and secret services around the world employ serial killers in large numbers. It might...

Alan Bennett’s piece on Philip Larkin (LRB, 25 March) was so subtle about the impact of the art on the life (and especially Larkin’s tendency to use his ‘fall-back position as Great Poet’ as a let-out for banal everyday selfishness) that it was a surprise to see Bennett approach the question of the impact our knowledge of the life should have on our reaction to the art by citing Auden: ‘Time...