Earl Miner

Reviewing M.B. Parkes on Punctuation in the West (LRB, 7 January), Danny Karlin earns our gratitude by opening the subject in arresting ways. He also leaves me feeling (such is readerly ingratitude) that his apertures need enlarging. He quotes with approval Parkes’s remark: ‘the merit of scriptio continua was that it presented the reader with a neutral text.’ After it has left the author, every...

There is no mystery about the ‘extract from a Japanese poem’ that Daniel Kevles (LRB, 17 August) reports Max Delbrück modestly sending friends who congratulated him on his Nobel Prize. It is taken from the opening and closing 16 lines leading off The Tale of the Heike, the third and by far the handsomest translation of which, by Helen McCullough, has recently been published by the Stanford University...

SIR: Marilyn Butler’s handsome and just review of Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs (LRB, 21 February) touches on many matters, three of which I should like to speak of (reversing her order). Butler says that Lurie ‘seems to insist … on the existence outside the world of her fiction, not of a proliferating series of fictions, but of a stable and real world’. Butler also mentions Lurie’s ‘acts...

SIR: No doubt other readers besides myself were impressed by Pat Rogers’s article on the Pepys Diary, (LRB, 16 June) which extends far beyond the last two volumes (Companion and Index). Two or three matters seem a bit weak. His preference for Evelyn over Pepys is personal (and well illustrated by Evelyn on the deaths of his children), although I doubt that the wicked world will share his choice....