Hilary Rose

Jackson Lears asserts that since the 1970s left-wing intellectuals have been drifting away from Chomsky’s rationalist humanism towards a hermeneutics of suspicion (LRB, 4 May). Yet Foucault was politically engaged, especially with the prisoners’ movement, and although today’s Foucauldians may have retreated from the barricades, Chomsky is still a towering figure of the left, unsilenced and unsilenceable.However,...

Yiannis Baboulias’s account of the uses of tear gas misses some of the history (LRB, 11 September). CS, the most commonly used agent, was developed at Porton Down in the 1950s. It was tested on UK servicemen with the inducement of weekend leave. Informed consent wasn’t on the agenda. The irritation that CS causes does, as Baboulias points out, involve nerves, but so does a gnat bite. The term ‘nerve...

As Adam Shatz points out, Claude Lanzmann wasn’t, as he liked to think, the first person to return to the scene of the Holocaust (LRB, 5 April). Rudolf Vrba, for one, had preceded him, though he had a very different story to tell from the ‘long moan’ of Lanzmann’s Shoah.In 1944, the communist cell in Auschwitz organised Vrba’s escape, along with a comrade, Alfred Wetzler, with the remit to...