Russia’s empires

Sir, – I am at a loss to know why, in his review of Russia’s Empires (September 22), Douglas Smith should resort to the cliché of “glaring omission” when the allegedly missing information is provided on pp 329–31, where I define Russia’s four empires. But this error is characteristic of a review which might more accurately be described as a caricature. Nor do I know why he castigates me for failing to write “a study of empire” when such was not my intention. The book is not about empires per se but about a specific Russian phenomenon which had hitherto gone unremarked: a tendency to build empires which collapse suddenly but are then resurrected in a somewhat different form. The book also takes new approaches to familiar problems, adduces some new evidence, and at a number of points challenges the conventional wisdom. Professor Smith, it seems, baulks at any deviation from the familiar.

For the rest, I shall confine myself to one point about which Smith seems to be particularly exercised: my references to genetic factors. This is indeed a minefield and can raise uncomfortable issues. As a Jew I am aware of the tainted scholarship in this field. However, the sources I quote are reputable. I report their findings, which I think merit consideration. Smith takes a contrary view. It is a point on which we can, perhaps, agree to differ.
 
PHILIP LONGWORTH
5 Parkgate Mews, London N6.
 

Persons unknown

Sir, – Peter Milward (Letters, September 29) asserts that I did a “grave injustice” to Robert Persons by “attributing” the Book of Christian Exercise to Edmund Bunny. What I actually did (Letters, September 8) was to compare the sales of Bunny’s version of the Book of Christian Exercise with the sales of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. (And it is Bunny’s version, not Persons’s version, which far outsold Foxe’s work.) Perhaps I should have gone into the questions of Bunny’s authorship of the work. I did not because, in the first place, it was not relevant to my point. In the second place, I assumed that this would be something generally known to your readers, since Victor Houliston, Brad Gregory and many others have been discussing Bunny’s appropriation of Persons’s text for some time now.

Might I suggest that Milward’s next letter should be to the RSC? They are advertising a production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, while, by Milward’s standards, they should be advertising a production of Plutarch’s Antony and Cleopatra, or perhaps the Plutarch/North Antony and Cleopatra.
Surely this is another “grave injustice” that demands correction.
 
THOMAS S. FREEMAN
29 Mill Road, Cambridge.
 

Syracuse’s cathedral

Sir, – Oliver Taplin’s review (September 15) of books on the archaeological legacy of Periclean Athens tells us of his visit to the cathedral in Syracuse in Sicily which incorporates the columns of an ancient Greek temple. His eloquent appreciation speaks to anyone who has been there: “Seen in the half-light of the church they have unforgettable, brooding numinosity”. However, he then goes on to complain that there are no signs giving archaeological information. In fact, the absence of such signage contributes to the wonder of this marvellous scene – the newer religion unselfconsciously incorporating into its fabric large elements of the older one.
 
BARBARA R. BERGMANN
5430 41 Place NW, Washington, DC 20015.
 

Our Way

Sir, – Adam Thorpe’s review of Andrew Motion’s memoir In the Blood (September 29) mentions “the salvatory English master, ‘Mr Way’”, the inverted commas somehow suggesting the fictional. Many former pupils remain deeply grateful for Peter Way’s inspirational teaching, and are sustained by his still active literary knowledge and judgement.
 
PETER RABY
71 Commercial End, Swaffham Bulbeck,
Cambridgeshire.
 

Hooligan altar boys

Sir, – West London altar boys from the 1950s, whether or not they admit to a hooligan past, will be queueing up to tell Lucy Beckett (reviewing John Cornwell’s Seminary Boy, September 29) that there never has been a Roman Catholic bishop at Brentford. It will have been the Bishop of Brentwood in Essex who sent Cornwell to Cotton College.
 
EDMUND KING
84 Knowle Lane, Sheffield.