Letters

Vol. 48 No. 10 · 4 June 2026

Rocket Science for Monkeys

Francis Gooding, writing about iconic words and their possible role in the origins of language, refers to the maluma/takete effect (also known by its variant bouba/kiki), whereby human subjects reliably associate the first of these nonsense words with round shapes, and the second with spiky shapes (LRB, 23 April). The effect has been demonstrated repeatedly, across cultures and speakers of different languages. It even occurs in infants. Correctly, Gooding mentions that chimpanzees fail the test. If this phenomenon is found in infants and not in other primates, the implication may be that it is tied intimately to our special biological capacity for language.

It is of great interest, then, that Maria Loconsole and others from the University of Padova recently reported in Science that the bouba/kiki effect is found in baby domestic chickens. Newly hatched chicks, less than a day old, placed in a room with a round shape and a spiky one, will tend spontaneously to explore the former when the word bouba is played, and the latter when the word kiki is played. Perhaps, then, this effect tells us less about human language and more about an evolved representation system shared by many species. The origin may lie not in the mouth movements we make, but in the statistics of the natural world, where spiky objects tend to make ‘spiky’ sounds and round objects ‘round’ sounds. Nonhuman primate studies, in using adult chimps with some language training, may inadvertently dilute something innate. In any case, these remarkable findings show that this mysterious phenomenon is much older than mankind.

Rahul Makam Clare College, Cambridge

Messing around with Eggs

As Thomas Jones mentions in his piece about Len Deighton, I did persuade him to spread his kitchen techniques to a wider world in the form of a comic strip, first in the Daily Express and then, when I moved to the Observer, in that paper (LRB, 7 May). However, there is a somewhat shameful detail to be added to the story. When he told me he was writing a book, I told him to stick to graphics, that he wasn’t a writer. The book was The Ipcress File. For the rest of his long life we were friends and he forgave my arrogant misjudgment.

It should also be said that Len’s non-fiction writing was good enough to challenge any investigative journalist. He had an unusual acuity regarding the large consequences of technical details. For example, in Fighter, he spotted the weakness of the Hurricane and the Spitfire in their armaments. They were both superb aircraft, but their machine guns were inferior to those of the Luftwaffe fighters, and it took too long to rectify this flaw. And, as Jones suggests, Bomber, his best work, was clear-eyed about the detached technical calculations behind the mass slaughter of civilian populations.

Clive Irving Sag Harbor, New York

Thomas Jones notes that James Bond, unlike Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer, ‘wouldn’t be found messing around with eggs in the kitchen until Roger Moore whips a quiche out of the oven’ in A View to a Kill. It was a different matter in the novels. In From Russia, with Love (1957), Ian Fleming’s James Bond insisted that his single boiled egg, from French Marens hens, be served in a Minton dark blue eggcup with a gold ring on top. (It amused Bond to think that ‘there was such a thing as the perfect boiled egg.’) What’s more, the recipe for ‘Scrambled eggs “James Bond”’ appears in the short story ‘007 in New York’, included in Fleming’s collection of travel essays from 1963, Thrilling Cities.

Jeffrey Susla Woodstock, Connecticut

T.J. Clark inventively unpacks the verbal echoes of the brown-black ‘V’ dominating Willem de Kooning’s painting Suburb in Havana, but makes no mention of a possible visual source for that form (LRB, 7 May). The painting is part of a series of large landscape abstractions that de Kooning began in 1957, in a departure from his figure-oriented compositions of the early to mid-1950s. One of the first of these landscapes, which Clark mentions in passing, is Bolton Landing. The title refers to the sculptor David Smith’s property near Lake George in upstate New York; it was the site of Smith’s studio, Terminal Iron Works, his home, and the fields where he photographed his work and, from the late 1950s, installed sculptures for outdoor display.

De Kooning and the painter Herman Cherry visited Smith at Bolton Landing in January 1957. They were old friends; Smith and de Kooning met around 1930. In November 1956, Smith had completed an important work, The Five Spring, a sculpture about six and a half feet tall, named for the elliptic leaf spring, once used for vehicle suspension. Turned on its side, the spring serves as a platform for the sculpture’s principal elements: two rods making a soaring ‘V’ and an upright steel rectangle. De Kooning and Cherry may have seen the piece in Smith’s workshop or possibly outdoors in the fields. In one photo Smith took of The Five Spring, the sculpture is elevated on a building block and a slab of old marble so that the ‘V’ and the vertical rectangle are silhouetted against the sky. The ‘V’ of Suburb in Havana is an unusual form in de Kooning’s paintings, and the brown of the foregrounded elements, which Clark describes as ‘faecal’, may nod to the warm rust colour of the sculpture. Obscuring a sculpture’s base and silhouetting the principal elements against a contrasting background are moves Smith typically made in his photos of sculptures, and de Kooning similarly isolates the key upright forms, which become, in effect, figures in a landscape. De Kooning would have had an opportunity to be reminded of The Five Spring when it was included in MoMA’s September 1957 mid-career retrospective of Smith’s work.

Christopher Lyon Brooklyn, New York

I know precious little about de Kooning, but I do know a bit about the Merritt Parkway, having spent too many hours over the years in bumper to bumper traffic along its scenic twists and turns. The service areas on the Merritt are not in the middle, as T.J. Clark says, but at the side of the road. They’ve been there all along. Several are twinned, one on the north side and the other on the south. Perhaps Clark is confusing the Merritt with the Hutchinson River Parkway, which does feature a large service area in the middle of the road (along with a hideous cell tower) in Westchester County, on the way to Connecticut from New York City. The Merritt was a real emblem of progress for New Englanders. The author of the history of my uncle’s heavy artillery battalion (populated with many men from Connecticut and Massachusetts) compared their rapid travel on Hitler’s autobahn at the end of the Second World War to a trip on the Merritt.

Tom Ciantra Alexandria, Virginia

Are you yourself?

Tim Parks cites Hans Christian Andersen’s Lykke-Peer as a key inspiration for A Fortunate Man (Lykke-Per) by Henrik Pontoppidan (LRB, 7 May). Parks doesn’t mention Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, published in 1867, three years before Andersen’s novel, and based on the exploits of a reindeer hunter from Gudbrandsdalen named Per Gynt, a legendary figure in Norwegian folklore. Many of the motifs, events and character traits that Parks points to in Pontoppidan’s Per can be found in Ibsen’s Peer: the dreams of greatness, the brashness and swagger, the frequent allusions to ‘trolls’, the youthful womanising, and the restless seeking of fortune far afield while feeling pulled relentlessly towards his childhood home. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are influences on both Ibsen and Pontoppidan, and both works end with – as Parks puts it, quoting Pontoppidan – ‘a voice from deep within … the voice of a phantom asking: But who are you yourself?’ At key moments in Peer Gynt, Peer is confronted by just such a ‘phantom’, the Bøyg, who asks: ‘Are you yourself, wholly and completely?’

Kirsten E. Shepherd St Catherine’s College, Oxford

Not All That

Robert Cioffi writes that ‘at its peak’ the Alexandrian library ‘may have contained as many as 750,000 volumes’ (LRB, 21 May) This claim, made in one of the books under review, is seriously misleading. Ancient figures for the size of the library vary widely, and the only ones approximating to Cioffi’s are from centuries later than its heyday. As the papyrologist Roger Bagnall argued some years ago, there are many reasons to suppose that the figure must have been much lower, possibly in the tens, not hundreds, of thousands. Cioffi also says that ‘around 400,000 volumes were lost’ in the fire caused by Julius Caesar during the Alexandrine war of 48 BCE, although this figure depends on a modern textual manipulation by scholars with, as Bagnall put it, ‘a bent for gigantism’.

Stephen Halliwell University of St Andrews, Fife

From Scythia

Barbara Newman wonders whether there might be any historical substance to the claim that the Picts came from Scythia (LRB, 5 March). ‘Given the absence of Pictish texts,’ she says, ‘we may never know.’ In fact the Picts did come from Scythia, if you go back far enough. Their DNA is indistinguishable from that of other Celtic inhabitants of Britain in late antiquity. The Celts, including the Picts, were descended primarily from the Bell Beaker people, who arrived around 2000 BCE, almost completely replacing the previous inhabitants. Where did the Bell Beaker people come from? Like all Indo-Europeans, they descend from the Yamnaya, a tribe of horse-riding steppe nomads whose ancestral home is precisely the region known in the classical period as Scythia. All of this could be coincidental. Bede may have ascribed Scythian status to the Picts in line with the fashion for classicising ethnic origins (Trojan origins were particularly popular, variously ascribed to the Britons, Romans, Germans and later the Turks). But it is just about possible that a memory of migration from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe survived among some of the Celtic tribes known as Picts.

Hassan Damluji London School of Economics, WC2

The Demon’s Question

Michael Wood, reviewing Julian Barnes’s Departures, notes the narrator’s ‘alarm’ on hearing about a man whose stroke had caused him to experience ‘cascades’ of memory (LRB, 7 May). ‘Tasting apple pie would trigger memories of all the pies he had ever tasted.’ In Wood’s retelling, the narrator (also called Julian Barnes) is seized by ‘a sort of terror’ at the thought that our brains might contain a ‘chronological listing’ of all our ‘lies, hypocrisies, cruelties’, our ‘infidelities of word and deed’.

I am reminded of Nietzsche’s demon in The Gay Science, who ‘steal[s] after you in your loneliest loneliness’, offering you the chance to relive your life ‘once more and innumerable times more’. You would, the demon warns, have ‘every pain and every joy, everything unutterably small or great in your life’ return to you ‘all in the same succession and sequence’. Far from heralding a universal gyre of world-historical repetition, the demon’s question is an intimately personal, emotional one: how do you feel about this? ‘Do you desire this, once more and innumerable times more?’ This question could ‘lie upon your actions like the greatest weight’. Perhaps, though, it isn’t a question for those at the end of their lives but for those near the beginning. How well disposed must you be towards yourself and your life, Nietzsche asks, to ‘crave nothing more fervently?’ For years I asked undergraduates the demon’s question, and their answers were usually some version of ‘Bring it on’. I think, though, they may have had Back to the Future in mind more than Nietzsche’s call to diligent moral scrutiny. It still seems to me a challenge to live your life so carefully that – at all times – you can bear the thought of yourself.

Min Wild University of Plymouth

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Find out more about the London Review of Books app

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences