Jim Holt

Edward Said, as Adam Shatz notes, hated the nickname ‘Ed’ (LRB, 6 May). Susan Sontag, we are told in Sigrid Nunez’s memoir Sempre Susan (2011), ‘bristled and sharply corrected anyone who called her Sue’. And Christopher Hitchens, as I can personally attest, got annoyed when anyone addressed him as ‘Chris’. They kept you on your toes, those three.

In the late 1990s I met Dolores Vanetti – who, as Joanna Biggs notes, nearly displaced Beauvoir as Sartre’s grande passion – at a party in New York (LRB, 16 April). When I told Vanetti that I was a fan of the French philosopher Alain, she offered to give me several volumes of Alain’s essays that had belonged to Sartre. I enthusiastically accepted, imagining that the volumes might contain marginal...