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Saturday 30 August 2008

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Transports of delight

Sir: I would have taken Andrew Neil’s criticism of our transport system (‘Our transport system is a joke’, 10 May) more seriously had it not been so disingenuous.

I understand the frustrations faced by rail passengers when events beyond their control conspire to delay or cancel planned journeys, but it is wrong to assume that a bad experience — particularly on a Sunday — is typical of the modern British railways. To make an objective judgment of the railways’ success, it is necessary to leave behind old assumptions that ignore how much the railways have improved.

Performance is higher today than for the last seven years. We have one of the youngest train fleets in Europe. Britain’s first dedicated high-speed rail line is now open and demand for rail travel has never been higher. Engineering works on the West Coast Main Line at weekends and holiday periods this year — the cause of Mr Neil’s delayed journey — are necessary in order to achieve the service improvements and higher capacity that we all want to see on that route from the end of this year.

And while I can understand his outrage at the price of his first-class ticket, is he suggesting the government intervenes in the market to subsidise the fares of business people and journalists using public money?

Tom Harris MP
Rail Minister, House of Commons, London SW1

Have a heart

Sir: At the risk of upsetting a fellow Oxonian’s sensibilities, Paul Johnson (And another thing, 10 May) seems to be mistaken in writing about the heart of Le Roi Soleil (or at any rate a French king) ending up in the stomach of a ‘Cambridge professor of the rougher sort’. It was William Buckland, reader of Mineralogy and Geology at Oxford and subsequently Canon of Christchurch and Dean of Westminster, to whom Augustus Hare ascribed that ‘honour’.

Buckland, who was a considerable innovator in the English school of geology and described the first dinosaur (Megalosaurus) in 1824, was also a notable eccentric who prided himself on eating his way through the animal kingdom. Hare wrote: ‘Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French King preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, “I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,” and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.’

Professor N.H. Gale MA, PhD, DSc, BSc, ARCS, FSA
Nuffield College, Oxford

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