Penny McCarthy

Blair Worden describes the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ as being by Sir Philip Sidney, adding that they were ‘acclaimed by a poem of Donne’ (LRB, 19 June). The Sidneian Psalms were translated by Mary Sidney and Philip Sidney, and Donne’s poem not only refers to both sister and brother in his title, but mentions them both throughout: ‘Two by their bloods, and by Thy Spirit one,/A brother and a sister’;...

Re Don Paterson and Ruth Padel’s discussion:The genitive of clitoris must be clitoreõs:any further remark would be otiose …(But was it really the grammar they were interested in?Or was it sin?)

It was standard practice in the 16th and 17th centuries to abjure responsibility for allowing one’s work to be published. So if Katherine Phillips did supply the printer with copy and pretend to be furious when it was published, as Margaret Anne Doody describes in her review of Germaine Greer’s Slip-Shod Sibyls (LRB, 14 December 1995), she would have been following the precedent of many male writers...

Richard Rorty’s review of Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity (LRB, 8 April) is a heartening example of the virtues of his own ethic – of dialogue, of being open to persuasion by the argumentation of others with whom one only partially agrees. But it still leaves some anomalies in the ‘anti-metaphysical’ position which should worry those who have no wish to rejoin the metaphysicians....

Having spent a little time in Sinfield’s ‘knowing study at Sussex’ this year while on an MA course in Renaissance literature, I must take issue with some of your Bardbiz correspondents – James Wood (Letters, 25 April) is one – who impute joylessness and arrogance to cultural materialists. I am a woolly liberal and a poet, and cannot always agree with my tutors on writing, cultural production,...