The Editors

Uri Avnery’s latest column: Rouhani is the very opposite of his predecessor. If the Mossad had been asked to sketch the worst possible Iranian leader Israel could imagine, they would have come up with someone like him.

Two poems by Seamus Heaney were published in the first issue of the LRB. A couple of dozen followed over the years, the most recent of them, versions of Rilke, in 2005. Two years ago Andrew O'Hagan wrote about travelling through England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales with Heaney and Karl Miller: Karl always imagines, in the Edinburgh style, that a beer means a half pint, but Seamus is a proper drinker and you see pints when he’s around.

Among the flotsam that drifts about the internet, coming to surfers' occasional notice, is Arthur C. Fifield's mocking rejection letter to Gertrude Stein of 19 April 1912: 'Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.' It received a flurry of attention in February 2011, and again a few weeks ago. Time perhaps for it to be joined by a note T.S. Eliot sent to Stein 15 years later, on 8 September 1927: I am very sorry to return these chapters, but in any case I should not be able to use them for a very long time...

From 'The Love Song of T.S. Eliot's Secretary: A Memoir', by Brigid O'Donovan, published in the Fall/Winter issue of Confrontation (1975): Every morning a large pile of contributions would arrive, many of them from agencies which were, and remained for years, household words in the literary world. These contributions were without exception complete rubbish: stories about dogs and cats; holiday adventure; poetry by total amateurs. All a tribute I imagine to the tiny salaries and low postage rates of the 1930s, which enabled firms to carry on from year to year without looking closely, if at all, into The Criterion corner. (A tremendous bonus was the equally extraordinary selection of books sent for review, many of them first class in fields The Criterion never covered for review. TSE took first choice of the books, I had second, and the remainder were sold by the firm.)

Reading Charles Lamb in Penguin's new edition, we were struck by this expression of frustration in ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ (1822): What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando’s, keeps the paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, ‘the Chronicle is in hand, Sir.’ Lamb’s fondness for chicken – ‘those tame villatic fowl’ – is well-documented (though he preferred roast pork), as is his reluctance to sit through grace when a sumptuous me