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Letters

Wednesday, 9th January 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

It would be more accurate to say that pop/rock music really lost its innocence at the appalling Altamont festival of December 1969. This event saw one killing, three accidental deaths, and an army of Hell’s Angels in violent attendance. It was at this point that the spirit of music unfortunately caught up with the political nastiness spawned in 1968.

Tim Holman
St Albans

Not at your convenience

Sir: Robin Holloway has observed — as any viewer must — the Grainger museum’s uncanny resemblance to (as he puts it) ‘a public lavatory without users’ (Arts, 15–29 December). This haunting architectural similarity became celebrated 70 years ago in a cautionary verse written by the then vice-chancellor, Sir John Medley (I quote from memory):

Pass on, impatient stranger;

This is not for your affair.

Pray for the soul of Percy Grainger,

But pray relieve yourself elsewhere.

It was at the time seriously suggested that the lines should be affixed to the structure, to warn off a certain class of intending callers.

Peter Ryan
Victoria, Australia

A legacy of democracy

Sir: I thoroughly enjoyed the splendid articles by Christina Lamb and William Shawcross on the late Benazir Bhutto (‘The fears of Pakistanis’; ‘At war with hatred’, 5 January). As a former near-neighbour of Ms Bhutto’s (in South Kensington), I asked her in May 1993 if she was afraid of assassination. ‘No, that would be my destiny,’ she immediately replied. This courageous lady’s legacy must be democracy returned to her beloved Pakistan. Her cowardly killers have silenced her, but not her message of hope.

Dominic Shelmerdine
London SW7
Found in translation

Sir: I read with interest the results of your Christmas poll (‘Do you believe in the Virgin Birth?’ 15–29 December). Galatians iv 4 shows that in about ad 53 Paul hadn’t heard of the Virgin Birth (‘born of a woman, born according to the Law’). But by about ad 90, drawing on Matthew, and Flavius Josephus’s ‘Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews’, Luke wrote Luke and Acts, elaborating with Matthew on a mistranslation of the word for ‘young woman’ in an Old Testament prophecy. This sowed a seed which fell into the fertile soils of a pre-existing Mediterranean matriarchal culture as well as the profound misogynistic psychosexual muddle that afflicted the early Church fathers, of whom St Jerome and St Augustine of Hippo are prime examples.

Rear-Admiral Guy F. Liardet CB CBE
Meonstoke, Hampshire

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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.