John Henry Jones

SIR: If I may add a point of information to Frank Kermode’s illuminating review (LRB, 20 November), there is one major Empson work which has not yet been published: the long essay on Marlowe’s Dr Faustus in which he expounds his theory that the play was censored and suggests a plan of reconstruction. The theme occupied him extensively throughout the last ten years of his life; the result of his...

SIR: The trouble with Michael Dummett’s book on the Tarot, to which William Empson referred in a recent letter (Letters, 18 September), is that while it leaves us dispossessed of some of our favourite myths it does not go far enough in explaining (or attempting to explain) the origin of these cards.Professor Dummett flails the 18th century and later occultists mercilessly for their duplicity in propounding...