Sponger
Sir: Nearly a page and a half about my book on Rousseau, and that on publication day and at the head of the book section! Who could ask for more? So even though your reviewer was not exactly flattering I would, of course, not dream of complaining. I would only ask him to do some explaining.
Were Dr Cobb a Rousseauphil I could understand his disapproval of my vocabulary, my lack of originality and, even worse, my deficient sense of fun. For the reception of my book has already re4ealed that, after two centuries in the grave, Jean Jacques still rouses feelings of sympathy and antipathy a° strong that they even seem to determine the marksa writer gets for his style, to say nothing of his judgment. Thus the Rousseauphil New Statesman found my book "clumsily written and crudely argued," while the Rousseauphobe Economist thought it "scintillating, brilliantly written and extraordinarily entertaining." Likewise the New i Statesman thought the book as a whole "lacking ti nearly every virtue a book ought to possess" unlike the Financial Times where Lord Snow described It as "extremely shrewd, also funny." But Dr Cobb is anything but a Rousseauphil, witness the summary manner in which he dismisses what Rousseau himself thought his best work, "he. also wrote a lot of rot about education." In fact, I don't know that in three years' reading I have ever come across so merciless, ferocious and abusive a Rousseauphobe as Dr Cobb showed himself in his colourful description of Jean Jacques "as the most accomplished sponger of modern times." Yet he censors me — who can give him chapter and page for dozens of passages exculpating Jean Jacques or finding attenuating explanations for his outrageous conduct — for being "so totally condemnatory." And
that is what I would dearly like him to explain. J. Huizinga 8 Lennox Gerdens Mews, London SW3
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