Anne Summers

Tim Parks compares Michael Moore’s new translation of Manzoni’s The Betrothed with the 1972 translation by Bruce Penman (LRB, 5 January). The extracts he quotes from the latter are strikingly similar to the wording in an earlier translation by Archibald Colquhoun. This appeared in 1951, with an interesting account by Colquhoun of his many predecessors: translations into English began in 1828,...

Paul Flewers and Ian Beckwith write about Anglo-Catholic radicals (Letters, 9 September and 7 October). We should add to the roster the Reverend Stewart Headlam, who founded the Christian Socialist Guild of St Matthew in 1877. Two years later he formed the Church and Stage Guild, which some described as a mission to chorus girls, and he was well known as a campaigner for state education. He joined...

Stefan Collini asks of league tables in higher education: ‘Has a single university been willing to repudiate the whole farrago rather than trying to put the most positive spin it can on the figures?’ Birkbeck, University of London, announced on 9 October that it would withdraw from UK university rankings because the methodologies do not fairly recognise Birkbeck’s strengths or represent the college...

Rosemary Hill refers to ‘the mass exodus from [domestic] service between the wars’, but census figures show that by 1931 the number of women employed as domestic servants was almost exactly the same as it was in 1911 (LRB, 14 July). This was by far the largest female occupational sector; just over 20 per cent of the ‘occupied’ female population were ‘living-in’ servants. The seemingly limitless...

Michael Wood, referring to Asghar Farhadi’s film A Separation, writes: ‘If Simin had not wanted to leave, Nader would not have had to employ anyone to look after his father’ (LRB, 4 June). But Simin is depicted as a working mother: she would have had homecare in place for her father-in-law for years. Had the director been a woman, I don’t think they would have made that mistake.