Clemency suggests

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Letters

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Readers respond to recent Spectator articles

Old-fashioned murder

Sir: There’s not the slightest hint in George Orwell’s essay that the murders people liked to read about ‘were the consequence of a hypocritical society’ (Roy Liddle, ‘The Foxy Knoxy case’, 17 November). Of course there were hypocrites. But the hypocrisy that led to murder was that of the murderer: he valued his reputation as good family man so strongly that he protected his relapse into sexual sin by murder. Orwell wrote the essay when conscienceless killings of the Meredith Kercher type had begun to appear for the first time. That’s why he called the essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ — murder with a moral dimension at its heart was being replaced by murder in the no man’s land of selfish sexual nihilism.

Norman Dennis

Director of Community Studies, Civitas, London SW1

Library’s silent majority

Sir: In his letter disputing Paul Barker’s account of the London Library’s recent AGM (17 November), Richard Davenport-Hines repeats the slur he made at the meeting, that members who object to the near-doubling of fees are a bunch of middle-class scroungers who have been abusing the library’s generosity for years. This doesn’t add up. The average member takes out ten books a year, most of which could be bought more cheaply on Amazon. The truth is that the London Library is itself supported by a silent, sizeable minority, some of whom go for years without taking out any books but keep up their subscriptions out of a desire to support a wonderful institution.

If the library is a charity, who are its beneficiaries? Davenport-Hines suggests that only the rich deserve to belong. Meanwhile, like the Trustees, he scrupulously ignores the elephant in the corner of the reading room, the library’s overambitious expansion into Mason’s Yard which has already swallowed several million pounds’ worth of endowment, and for which architects Haworth Tompkins have commissioned toilet blocks from Turner Prize-winner Martin Creed — apparently a worthier recipient of the library’s charity than the shabby literati for whom it was created.

Laura Gascoigne

London NW3

Voices off

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Dan Brown

November 25th, 2007 9:23pm

Perhaps this lack of integrity in modern building design and construction is due partly to the tragic manner in which our commercial and residential property is now largely regarded as a commodity.

Vast expanses of urban sprawl and suburban development are now covered in estates of houses and "executive" apartments, built flimsily in the pastiche or some pseudo-modern blandness. Little consideration is given to infrastructure, which often consists of a chain supermarket and smaller services; very often these developments are built in complete isolation, connected to town or city only by motorway junction or bypass.

Our capacity to exploit buildings for our financial gain is leaving us with cultural and architectural bankruptcy. Surely it is time to leave this obsession, emerge from making home improvements and calculating the percentage profit that has been made over the past 10 years, and actually create new buildings and cities that matter- buildings that excite and endure, external spaces that stimulate and bring us together. Inspiration is not so distant - visit Barcelona, Rome, Berlin.