Tolstoy was a philosopher and a great storyteller

sir – I am writing regarding “Never read War and Peace? Now is the time”, (Books, March 18).

First, War and Peace. The “rumours of its rambling philosophical discourse”, though persistent, are false. Tolstoy sensibly swept all such thoughts into his second epilogue, which most people fail to read. A pity, because these passages contain advanced ideas. To quote my own short biography of Tolstoy:

“The forces at work in human history are beyond logic and reason, and no outcome stems exclusively from what looks like its proximate cause. Nothing is certain. Every occurrence is contingent … The forces that matter in history, society and all human lives are chance, randomness, multivalence, probability. Indeterminacy is lord of the universe.”

It is this kind of counter-intuitive thinking (also demonstrated by Dostoyevsky) that gives Russian literature its heavyweight quality. However, it never clogs the narrative of War and Peace.

Second, Ben Thomas says “computer analysis suggests that Shakespeare was greatly helped by

Marlowe”, which is misleading.

At the time, the two authors are supposed to have been collaborating, Shakespeare had no publications. Marlowe, on the other hand, had written several successful plays, beginning with Tamburlaine (1587), that had both delighted audiences and helped to make Edward Alleyn and Philip Henslowe rich men. If collaboration did ever occur, it is clear who the senior partner was.

Professor Anthony Briggs

Brinkworth, Wiltshire

sir – Brian Ross (Letters, April 17) is right to highlight the parallels between Britain in the time of Covid-19 and John Wyndham’s The

Day of the Triffids.

However, surely the following passage is even more apt in week four of lockdown, as the increasingly devastating impact of coronavirus on our world becomes apparent:

“It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that ‘it can’t happen here’, that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm.”

Mark Higginbottom

Chesterfield, Derbyshire