E.E. Duncan-Jones

SIR: John Sturrock does not in his estimable review (LRB, 19 March) inspire full confidence in Terence Kilmartin’s revision of Scott-Moncrieff’s translation of Proust. It is impossible to judge with certainty of the aptness of translations of clauses and phrases taken out of context. But the dozen or so examples of changes made by Kilmartin that Sturrock gives are picked from many that he came...

SIR: Your reviewer is mistaken in saying (LRB, 16 October) that Luttrell, the famous wit of Holland House, left nothing in print. The best of his published poems, Advice to Julia (1820), was at once despatched by John Murray to Byron then in Ravenna; Byron, thought it ‘very good indeed’. Eleven years later Macaulay describes it to his sister Hannah as ‘neat, lively, piquant, and showing the most...