Richard Todd responded: >There seems to be virtual unanimity on this list that Solomon was wrong >in his Brentano deduction. He admits that there is room for reasonable >doubt, but it seems to me that he presents a plausible case for the >identification. As for a letter in the possession of a mysterious >nobleman, but unavailable to anyone else . . . come on now! And I'm afraid I have to agree with Richard on this one. Just because the letter cannot be published does not mean that scholars who have read it--Joyce Maier's insider acquaintance, for example--couldn't paraphrase, summarize and analyze it. And I have a question about the Solomon biography. I haven't read it, but I gather that the theory underpinning Solomon's biography is psychological. Now, that fact alone, that Solomon uses psychology, does not, for me anyway, automatically make his book a bad biography. It seems to me that there are good biographies which employ the insights of psychology, and bad biographies which employ the insights of psychology. The mere fact that a biography uses psychology, though, does not, in itself, disqualify the work. I do believe that biographers have to have some--one hesitates to use the word, it's such a bogey these days--theory which enables them to decide which facts are relevant, which are irrelevant, which should be foregrounded, which only glanced at, and so on. Otherwise we get mere chronology--first this happened, then that happened and then this happened . . . . So, in the estimate of Solomon's critics, is his biography bad *because* it's psychological, or is it a bad psychological biography? Yours, David Cozy mailto:[log in to unmask]