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Letters

Wednesday, 16th April 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Nothing sacred

Sir: How depressing — an attempt by the BBC to give sacred choral music a significant airing on television, torn to shreds by one of the country’s leading choral directors (Arts, 12 April). What I found most intriguing was Peter Phillips’s proposition that ‘the ideal television history of classical music will be expensive, and it will have to include a lot of straight talking about technical musical matters’. ‘Ideal’ for whom, one wonders?

Sacred Music may not have had a lasting effect on Mr Phillips, but fortunately he does not speak for many other viewers who, in my experience at least, are very happy to see such a programme making an appearance at last — even with its flaws.

Tim Ranford
Oxford
Justice for Mosley

Sir: Taki is undoubtedly the master at throwing, metaphorically, one bone to a number of dogs and then seemingly unconcerned at the outcome, moving on. I refer to the little bone in his column about Sir Oswald Mosley, (High Life, 12 April). Mosley and his wife were of course interned, not imprisoned as he states — quite a difference. Then he adds ‘unfairly’. I lived through this time. The man was a distinct threat. A declared fascist in Nazi-style uniform, his wife’s sisters both friends of Adolf Hitler, conducting hostile demonstrations and up to the war staging a campaign of vilification and abuse aimed at the Jews. Even after the war he did not leave the scene, calling for an end to non-white immigration in 1959. I ‘tasted the bone’ Taki and didn’t like it. Internment was quite justified and in no way unfair.

Eric Watson
Via email

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M Deacon

April 17th, 2008 8:32am

Two points from his letter on Mosley for Eric Watson to consider:

Would England now be a better or worse place for the English if non - white immigration had been very substantially less?

Would the countries from where the immigrants came not be a lot better off if these immigrants had been given the opportunities of bettering themselves in their own countries?