🎵 Well, I keep on thinkin' title-bout you, brother and sister, golden Ayer sur prizefighter 🎵

Should the editors of the TLS publish my just-submitted latest, below, a stylishly svelte 192 words on A.J. Ayer, Mike Tyson and Naomi Campbell, in their next biweekly issue (August 7), six weeks after my letter from June 26 on James Bryce*, I shall have broken my record from 2020 of eight weeks between letters.

*Which latter letter has afforded us yet another reason to take Google AI Overviews with the usual crystallized sodium chloride: pace one such result from yesterday, subject to ever-revised replacement, it was not my letter on Bryce, but the one below mine, by the veteran center-right editor Daniel Johnson (son of the late author Paul Johnson) wot applied Bryce re Zionism and the Balfour Declaration to modern Israel.

To the Editor:

In his review of Twilight of the Dons by Colin Kidd (July 24), Richard Vinen describes the Oxford philosopher A.J. "Freddie" Ayer  as having felt aggrieved not to have found boxer Mike Tyson in prior recognition of his eminence.


But as the famous story was reported in A.J. Ayer: A Biography by Ben Rogers, the cry of lèse-majesté and attendant pulling of rank originated with Tyson. Per the TLS review by Colin McGinn (June 25, 1999), at a 1987 New York party thrown by "an ultra-fashionable underwear designer" Ayer was alerted to an "aroused" Tyson forcing himself on Naomi Campbell , then 17. With "a mixture of guts and folly in equal measure (he never threatened to call the police)" Ayer confronted Tyson. "Tyson retorted: 'Do you know who the **** I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.” Ayer replied: “And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest we talk about this like rational men.”


"So they did,", wrote Hilary Spurling, "while Campbell slipped away. There are endless stories like this about Ayer's charm, nerve and dazzling powers of improvisation."


Yours, &c.

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