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Letters

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Readers respond to recent Spectator articles

Sir: It was good to find Bryan Forbes a television-shouting supporter (‘Shouting at my telly’, 17 November). I join with him, especially in vocally denouncing background music. It is difficult enough for one of my advanced years watching crime thrillers to fathom why on earth who has killed whom. It is doubly difficult when totally irrelevant music drowns the dialogue. Another phenomenon which causes my hackles — and voice — to rise is mispronunciation. Am I alone in shouting ‘kilometre’ when a speaker (who would never dream of saying centimetre) stresses the second syllable?

Eric Dehn

Bristol

I raised a 3 A.M. Girl

Sir: Unlike Rachel Johnson, I was delighted to introduce a daughter as a 3 A.M. Girl (‘Can anyone be a writer now?’, 17 November). Jessica was one of the three ‘founding sisters’ of the Daily Mirror column, stayed on it for five years, and then produced Wicked Whispers, an hilarious account of celebrity-bashing recently published by Michael Joseph.

I would have been far less enthusiastic in introducing her as a Guardian headbanger whingeing about the environment or, worse, wasting her time writing mind-numbing features for the Independent that would be read by three people in Notting Hill.

Paul Callan

London, SW1

Sir: If Melanie Phillips had checked her facts - or checked with the subject of her article - she would have avoided making assertions about Mr. Khalid Bin Mahfouz which are wrong ('The Lights go out in Britain', 20 November).

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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.

A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.