Nick Hordern replies:

Judith Armstrong is quite correct to point out that Khodorkovsky supported the liberal cause. This was both before his arrest, in his financial backing of the liberal opposition in the Duma (as I said in my review); and afterwards in jail, when his writings won plaudits from many sources. But despite this support for liberalism, Khodorkovsky’s stance – including his comments that he is not ‘especially a liberal’, that he is ‘for a strong state’, and that it was necessary for former state assets like Yukos to be sold for ‘symbolic prices’ (all quotes from Sakwa’s book) – is sufficiently nuanced to require a longer analysis than a short review format permitted. And however inspirational his views, Russians – even liberal ones – must wonder whether they would have been better off had Khodorkovsky and his fellow oligarchs not got their hands on Russia’s national wealth for ‘symbolic prices’.

Her bibliographers we

Dear Editor,

In a letter about the literature of World War I (August 2014), Clare Rhoden mentions Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, recently republished in Text Classics. The Text edition refers to first publication in London 1929. Simon Caterson, in his introduction, writes of its being ‘first published … under a pseudonym in a subscription edition of [500] copies. An expurgated version – entitled Her Privates We – was released a year later. The author of both versions was given as “Private 19022” [Manning’s own service number]. The original text used in the present Text edition did not appear again in print until 1977.’

Text includes the general epigraph to the first edition (volume one), which contextualises the title of both versions. It is an abridged quotation from Hamlet: ‘On fortune’s cap we are not the very button … Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours? ’Faith, her privates we.’ Manning attributed the quotation simply to ‘Shakespeare’, whom he quotes frequently throughout both versions of the novel to show the different faces of war. It is apparent from this epigraph, which was dropped in the expurgated edition, that the scholarly Manning had both titles in mind before the first version was published.

The novel was intended to provide an authentic picture of life in the English ranks, in contrast to the preceding fiction of the war, which was written from officers’ point of view. Both versions were greeted as vividly authentic by readers of the limited edition and by surviving ranker-readers of the popular edition alike. The expurgation of the second version apparently involved swearing, not permitted by censorship in 1929. (After extensive research I have not found any discussion of a collation of both versions.)

Ironically, the titles of the two versions, The Middle Parts (the first) and Her Privates We (the second), appear to be mismatched: the witty, reverberant latter one, punningly scurrilous, being given to the expurgated edition, while the bland title of the first (which in the Hamlet quotation mainly serves to provoke the punchline of HPW) was given to the unexpurgated edition.

Further, I regret that the more challenging title is falling into disuse apparently because of posthumous publishing agreements or bibliographic law which privileges an author’s so-called ‘final intentions’. Manning, who died in 1935, was not around when the novel was first republished (1977), though there were many imprints of the expurgated, popular edition.

Laurie Hergenhan, Brisbane, Qld

Abstract spookiness

Dear Editor,

It feels as if I experienced a very different production of Macbeth from the one reviewed here (August 2014). Although Jonathan Dunk is knowledgeable about Shakespeare, what seems to have been overlooked is the ensemble effect and affect of a production that is inventive – not ‘quaint’. The music in particular was astonishingly brilliant in its abstract spookiness. It operated as a key element in evoking a protracted mood of dread and anxiety.

Hugo Weaving, as Macbeth, was convincing in his intense examination of a life not so well lived. I was not conscious of the ‘Tomorrow’ speech being ‘spat out’ – the mood was more one of defeatism. Melita Jurisic’s Lady Macbeth was not ‘simply bad’. She played her part competently, not badly. There is a difference.

Suzie Gibson (online comment)

Jonathan Dunk replies:

I agree with Dr Gibson that the business of criticising theatre is a fraught one, no performance being wholly iterable. We do appear to have attended markedly different productions. Of the ensemble effect she describes I found little trace. Rather, as I have written, I perceived a deep stylistic dissonance between the casual register affected by the supporting cast and Weaving’s often lyrical performance. The production’s soundscape, which I did indeed neglect to mention in the review, was affective in the same rudimentary sense that a bass groan reliably produces a sensation of menace, and a shrill howl evokes the presence of a storm. These frankly intuitive measures are the daily bread of student theatre, and in this play they elucidated the nuance of neither the character nor the world of Macbeth. I found Weaving’s performance neither examining nor examined, but I think that individual performance is where we must allow the widest margin for possible response, being so much a matter of personal instinct and presence.

I used the word ‘quaint’ precisely, to describe the comparative tone of specific scenes in the fourth act. I did not intend to ascribe that quality to the production. There is indeed a difference between competence and ineptitude. But for the sake of clarity, is competence an achievement? Surely when one of the most harrowing tragedies in literature is performed by actors of training, experience, and international repute, amply funded furthermore by a national flagship company, competence is the utter minimum of virtue. Dr Gibson and I seem to have approached Macbeth with very different levels of expectation. I don’t think we go to the theatre to witness competence; I believe we do it to feel transport, ecstasy, pity, and terror.

Human frailty

Dear Editor,

I have recently been steeped in World War II stories – Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Weary Dunlop’s biography – and movies such as Paradise Road and The Railway Man, all describing Japanese atrocities. Christine Piper’s novel, After Darkness (reviewed in September 2014), while depicting the ultimate atrocities, also shows the human frailty that allows such things to happen. I felt conflicted about feeling sorry for her flawed but ultimately heroic character Dr Ibaraki, but was won over by her insightful writing. The novel adds an extra human dimension to Piper’s Calibre-winning essay on the same subject, ‘Unearthing the Past’ (April 2014). I will be recommending it widely.

Karen Brown (online comment)

A philosophical selfie

Dear Editor,

Tim Oakley’s cogent review of Simon Blackburn’s book, Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-love (May 2014), considers the concept of vanity, and cites its refraction through a L’Oréal advertisement where the actor Andie McDowell – apparently unchanged since Four Weddings and a Funeral – purrs, ‘Because you’re worth it!’ The reviewer goes on to ask, ‘What sort of vanity is being appealed to by the slogan, and moreover what sort of vanity … is being manifested by the buyers of the cosmetics?’ He concludes, ‘But surely the vast majority are not [vain].’

Indeed. Advertising shows us that, far from vanity being the motivating engine, anxiety fuels the purchase – the desire to be thought of well by one’s fellows, and the nervous fear that one is in fact unacceptable, not up to the mark: an ambition far short of any wish to create envy in the onlooker. Narcissistic vanity only arises when even this distorted referent is absent.

Jacqueline Abbott, Richmond, Vic.