Letters

4 July 2009

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Each to his own, they say, though it is a bit worrying to see a verb like ‘downplay’ in the Spectator. It is also a bit odd to read that Apocalypse Now (Number 2 — you are joking!) has ‘a richness of literary reference that is appreciated only by those sufficiently addicted to use the freeze-frame button’. Au contraire, Kurtz’s bookshelf is there for all to see. Thanks to clever-clogs Coppola and his lingering lens, nobody can possibly miss it.

As for The Night of the Hunter being ‘an eccentric, provocative choice’ as the most essential film of all, in view of what had come before it was a bit tame. A really provocative choice would have been Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In the end, any ‘greatest’ list comes down to one question: where is Singin’ in the Rain? According to your judges there are 31 movies more ‘essential’. There aren’t. ‘Quite simply,’ as Mr Hoskin likes to write, there isn’t one.

Michael Henderson
London W13

Ancestral ties

Sir: Following the letter from Lt Col N.J. Ridout (27 June) about meeting a woman who could remember Waterloo, I’d like to point out that my French elder sister, now aged 71, recalls that she was once told by a 102-year-old aunt that her grandfather, as a child, was a page at Louis XV’s court (1715-1774).

N. Beaumont
Surrey

Advice to tourists

Sir: I was surprised not to see an acknowledgement of Gerard Hoffnung, the founder of ‘misinformation’ (Competition, 27 June). His advice to tourists visiting Britain included such gems as: ‘When entering a railway carriage be sure to shake hands with all the occupants before taking your seat’; ‘If driving ignore any signs saying “Keep Right” or “Keep Left”, these are merely political slogans’; and my favourite: ‘Be sure to try the famous echo in the reading room at the British Museum’.

Terry Walsh
West Chiltington, West Sussex

An Apology

In John Kampfner’s article, we stated that Alastair Campbell prevailed upon Lord Butler to tone down important sections of his report on intelligence used in the build-up to the Iraq war. We are happy to accept that this is not so, and that Mr Campbell, who left Downing Street in 2003, played no role in relation to the Butler inquiry, to which he was not a witness. We apologise to him for our error and have agreed to make a donation to the fund he has established for Leukaemia Research in honour of Henry Hodge.