Christopher Small

‘How,’ asks Helen Vendler (LRB, 16 October), in a thorough demolition job on Andrew Motion’s new biography of Keats (and with reference to the ‘Ode to Autumn’), ‘can Motion have been persuaded to think of the bees as exploited and overworked labourers? Can a poet so misread another poet? And if so, why?’ The answer to these questions seems to be simple. Surely he was ‘persuaded’ by...

Leo Steinberg, so Frank Kermode tells us in his review of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (LRB, 3 April), eschews literary support for his exposition. But Kermode is under no such limitation, and it is odd that he doesn’t mention the most striking 20th-century example, in D.H. Lawrence’s late novella The Escaped Cock, posthumously published under the bowdlerised...

It’s surprising that, discussing the sexual significance of zippers, and the part played by this in their eventual hold on public fancy, E.S. Turner (LRB, 6 April) doesn’t mention Brave New World (1932, rather earlier than the epoch suggested for the zipper’s arrival as ‘the tool and symbol of seduction’). Surely Huxley’s super-pneumatic Lenina, stepping alluringly from her unzipped zippicamiknicks,...

Mark Lilla’s review of The Magus of the North, Isaiah Berlin’s essay upon Johann Georg Hamann (LRB, 6 January) makes no mention of an earlier study of Hamann by the Scottish theologian R. Gregor Smith (J.G. Hamann: A Study in Christian Existence, 1960). This seems odd, if only as a matter of routine academic courtesy; though it may be, of course, that Isaiah Berlin doesn’t mention it either....

Michael Neve concludes his interesting article on the double in literature and psychological theory (LRB, 8 November) with an appreciative summing-up of past achievement and what seems to be a large invitation to the future: ‘Given the grandeur of much of what results from literary duality, and from the critical minds who have had the courage to keep it alive, it is worth looking forward to what...