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Saturday 22 November 2008

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Letters

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

Readers respond to recent articles in The Spectator

He subsequently taught creative writing to young poets, who would go to local pubs in search of Pernod and other fancy drinks. When these mild, wispy-bearded young men were accosted by burly drunks they had only to mention that they were poets for their would-be tormenters to scatter in alarm.

They had learnt the lesson that if you know what’s good for you, you don’t mess with poets; they’ll bust your nose as soon as look at you.

Robert Ireland
Harrow-on-the-Hill, Middlesex

Devices and desires

Sir: Page 13 of your 24 November issue carries an advertisement for a BlackBerry with the GPS device showing a location between St James’s and Piccadilly. ‘Distance to destination’ is shown as 14 miles and ‘Time to destination’ as 19 minutes. I really want one of those!

James Leith
Malmesbury, Wiltshire

Can it

Sir: I would just add one thing to Bryan Forbes’s excellent article regarding the dire state of British television (‘I have earned the right to shout at my television’, 17 November), and that is the insult to one’s intelligence that is ‘canned laughter’. I know what I find funny: I don’t need to be cajoled. It’s especially annoying when it’s inserted over dialogue (which may or not be funny, one will never know). There is also, of course, the minor point that we have to pay for this drivel — when courtesy of the BBC — otherwise the bailiffs come round and break our doors down. I would happily pay proportionately for the small amount that I actually watch. Say, a tenner? I learnt at my mother’s knee to always (at least attempt to) get value for money: with the BBC I am simply being ripped off.

Hugh Wain
Mortimer, Berkshire

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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.