Letters

Vol. 48 No. 16 · 10 September 2026

Show Us the Father

James Wood recalls his father describing his PhD thesis on ‘the wing mechanism of the stick insect’, and rightly senses something fictional in it (LRB, 13 August). The thesis is real, but the wings are not. D.W. Wood’s 1957 Glasgow thesis is titled ‘Studies on the Neuromuscular Anatomy and Physiology of the Stick Insect, Carausius morosus’. The subject is legs. He mapped the nerves and muscles of the stick insect leg, then drove microelectrodes into the flexor tibialis, the muscle that bends the knee, and described two distinct motor axons supplying it, one producing fast twitches and the other the slow contractions that hold a limb in place. Carausius morosus has no wings at all. Either his son misremembered, or Wood was amusing himself.

I know the thesis because the work is still read and cited in my field. Today we have a complete wiring diagram of the nerve cord of another insect, the fruit fly, imaged using serial electron microscopy and traced by machine learning. The two classes of motor neurons Wood distinguished are visible in this connectome as separate populations co-ordinated by distinct premotor circuits. He pulled the electrodes himself over a gas flame and built a vacuum tube amplifier that could record from them. The distinction he drew in 1957 is taught today as a fundamental organising principle of limb motor control.

Wood writes movingly about the parent as a wiped slate on which the child does the writing. A son may add wings. But Dennis Wood gave his early career to the question of how a limb holds steady under load, which seems the better subject for the parent his son describes.

John Tuthill University of Washington, Seattle

James Wood gives a wry account of his encounters with sexually predatory staff at boarding school. It deserves some elaboration. He describes the way Reverend Canon John Grove, his headmaster at Durham Cathedral’s Chorister School, liked to examine Wood and the other little boys’ genitals, revealing frustrated desires that, Wood writes, ‘perhaps struck us as poignant’. It should be said that the school has had to pay tens of thousands of pounds in compensation to around two dozen of Grove’s victims for sexual assaults during his tenure.

Wood describes Grove as a ‘warm and brilliant’ teacher; even the weekly genital inspection ritual was ‘civilised’. It is not uncommon in such memoirs of schooldays to read that a predator was likeable and good at their job, or for this to be offered as an excuse or even an exoneration. It may well explain why colleagues, parents and ex-pupils do not act to stop the predation, despite the clear risk to children. ‘Groper’ Grove’s predilections, from accounts I have had from his victims, were known about beyond the school, yet he taught there unimpeded for 21 years until his retirement in 1978. He had been dead for twelve years before the first victim dared go to the police.

The Eton College master Raef Payne, who remarked on Wood’s ‘delicious navel’, was not just a ‘camp’ eccentric: he was a habitual fondler of the youngest boys in his charge as a housemaster in the 1970s. I was one of them. While most of us shrugged this off, trying to keep out of reach of his prying hands – Payne too was a likeable man – there are credible accounts of more serious assaults on children in his charge, at Eton and elsewhere. Payne retired and then died in 2000, long before any of this emerged.

It does not aid the work of those attempting to better protect children in institutions today if the behaviour of such criminals is discounted or seen as a mere historical peculiarity. Predators seek jobs where vulnerable and emotionally needy children are available, and then secure themselves in position by being charming and effective, even indispensable. Grooming happens not just to victims, but to families, colleagues and entire institutions. The latter, often more eager to protect their reputations than their charges, find it easy to collude. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse reported on this in 2022. However, despite promises, successive governments have failed to put more than a few of IICSA’s recommendations into practice – not least criminal sanctions to punish wilful cover-ups by those in charge.

Alex Renton Edinburgh

All His Own Work

James Butler writes that ‘almost no politician writes his own books, and few people actually read them’ (LRB, 13 August). Here in France writing a book seems to be a rite of passage for would-be presidential candidates. It was recently reported that the two books published so far by Jordan Bardella, president of the far-right Rassemblement National, had sold nearly 300,000 copies, earning him royalties of more than a million euros. In France, the right and far-right dominate the bestseller lists for political books. Éric Zemmour, leader of the extreme-right party Reconquête, Philippe de Villiers and Nicolas Sarkozy have all sold books in the hundreds of thousands. Sales on the left are generally more modest. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist presidential candidate in 2022 and mayor of Paris from 2014 until earlier this year, seems to hold the record for the biggest flop, selling just a few hundred copies of her book in 2019. François Hollande has had more success, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, has reportedly sold 400,000 copies of his manifesto L’Avenir en commun since the first edition appeared ten years ago. Books from centrist politicians are notably absent from the bestseller lists.

Whether sales figures reflect what is actually being read is another matter, and of course what one reads doesn’t necessarily reflect one’s political stance. However, the figures do seem to reflect the stark cleavage between right and left, and the lack of enthusiasm for the centre, currently in charge in French politics. As for authorship, there is no doubt that Zemmour, Hollande and Mélenchon write their own books. Bardella also claims to have written his books himself. A critic writing about his first book for Libération remarked that ‘the style is so bad one concludes that he really has written it on his own.’

Peter Hoskins Saintes, Charente-Maritime

Tangible Imprints

Clare Jackson quotes Lauren Working’s claim that her book A Golden World ‘traces the tangible imprints that Indigenous peoples across the Americas made on Tudor and Stuart society’ (LRB, 23 July). Jackson’s account largely treats material objects such as pearls, pelts and pipes as evidence of these impressions, but more could perhaps be made of the imprints that Indigenous people themselves left on English and European audiences. Caroline Dodds Pennock’s On Savage Shores (2023), which Jackson cites, relates the stories of some of the many Indigenous Americans who crossed the Atlantic eastwards during the 16th and 17th centuries. Their presence was often a matter of widespread interest and curiosity among ordinary people as well as the elites who Jackson says are foregrounded in A Golden World. This is particularly true of the four Inuit forcibly transported to England from what is now Baffin Island by Martin Frobisher in 1576 and 1577. Writing several decades after the event, William Adams recounted that ‘many beheld’ one of these captives, a man named ‘Callicho’, as ‘he rowed in a little boat made of skin in the water at the Backe [in Bristol], where he killed two ducks with a dart.’ The expedition’s chief funder, Michael Lok, said that they projected ‘a wonder onto the whole city [of London] and to the rest of the realm’. Images of Frobisher’s abductees circulated widely enough that in 1578 the Dutch fisherman Adriaen Coenen was able to make copies of pictures that had been shown to him by a sailor in The Hague. They are included in his Visboeck (‘fish book’), completed in 1580 and held in the National Library of the Netherlands.

Alister Wedderburn University of Glasgow

Chiefly Lyrical

Reviewing Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep, Peter Howarth refers to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘first volume, Poems, published in 1832’ (LRB, 13 August). Tennyson’s first volume of poetry, Poems, by Two Brothers, was actually published in 1827 (it was in fact by three brothers, Alfred, Charles and Frederick). His first solo volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, was published in 1830. As Holmes notes, this too was intended as a collaboration, between Tennyson and Arthur Hallam – in the spirit of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and as ‘a sort of seal of our friendship’. The initiative was scuttled at the last minute by Hallam’s father, and Arthur’s contributions were privately printed, as Poems, the same year. Few copies remain, but at least two early owners saw fit to complete the ‘seal’ and bound Tennyson and Hallam’s volumes together.

Colton Valentine Harvard University

In the City

Susan Pedersen mentions the urban historian Jim Dyos, co-editor of The Victorian City (1973), which she describes as ‘the defining publication of this infant field’ (LRB, 23 July). She also mentions Michael Wolff, the book’s other editor. But he was never, as she claims, at MIT. He founded the interdisciplinary journal Victorian Studies while at Indiana University, Bloomington, and moved in 1970 (via a sabbatical at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, then awash with money from shares in Xerox) to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught for the rest of his life. Michael and I wrote the essay ‘Pictures from the Magazines’, which appears in The Victorian City.

Pedersen correctly observes that urban sociology and history took root in the provincial universities, not so much at Oxford and Cambridge. When, sometime around 1973, Jim Dyos came to speak at the Oxford postgraduate British history seminar, held in the Wharton Room at All Souls, the projector that was found for him fused the college’s lights. Thereafter Jim had to extemporise without the slides, which he had hoped would serve as prompts. No doubt this incident confirmed Oxford in its prejudices.

Celina Fox Great Chishill, Cambridgeshire

At Campo Verano

Alan Hollinghurst writes that the epitaph on Ronald Firbank’s gravestone in Rome, ‘Pray for the Soul of Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank Who Entered into Rest on 21st May 1926 Far Away from His Country’, is an odd one, ‘omitting any mention of his age or when he was born, or indeed what his country was’ (LRB, 13 August). I remember being struck by that, too, though the gravestone is under a tree and gets seasonally discoloured and is sometimes illegible. Firbank’s is one of those graves I always pass by when in Campo Verano cemetery. The others on my list include Walter Audisio (‘Colonel Valerio’, the Partisan who shot Mussolini as well as his mistress Clara Petacci, who is resentfully interred as far away as possible on the other side of the cemetery); Laura d’Oriano (a Swiss-Italian spy, shot by firing squad in 1943, virtually unknown even – tellingly – in Italy); Ernesto Nathan (a London-born anticlerical mayor of Rome); and Siniša Mihajlović (a Serbian footballer, and arguably the greatest free-kick taker of all time). Campo Verano must be the most underestimated and unvisited necropolis in Europe, which is bizarre given Rome’s tourist footfall and the celebrity of the Parisian ones (Verano is twice the size of Père Lachaise). It won’t have helped Firbank’s memorialisation that, being a Catholic, he isn’t in Rome’s much more famous and Brit-trodden ‘Protestant Cemetery’, which hosts Keats and Shelley. It’s actually not a Protestant cemetery – that’s a North European aggrandisement – but the Cimitero Acattolico or Non-Catholic Cemetery. Hence the atheist Antonio Gramsci being there, and the presence of Jewish and Muslim graves.

Simon Skinner Cambridge

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