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Thursday 4 December 2008

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Letters

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Byrd song

Sir: Peter Phillips mentions (Arts, 3 May) hearing Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices in the unlikely setting of Lusaka, Zambia. I too have a happy memory of hearing a Byrd Mass, in this case for Three Voices, in an unexpected setting some years ago. My wife and I were members of a small congregation at a service of Holy Communion at Stiffkey Church, Norfolk. Just before the service began three young men entered the church and told the priest that they would be pleased to sing the Byrd Mass as an accompaniment. One of the three I believe was Michael Chance, the celebrated alto. Anyway, these three young men left my wife and I with a wonderful feeling of elation that such a thing could happen in a small country church.

Bill Marshall
Linslade, Bedfordshire

War of words

Sir: Sorry, Anthony Horowitz (Letters, 10 May), but Foyle’s War often contained linguistic anachronisms. Recent examples include ‘to loan a book’, ‘peek’, ‘to fill out a coupon’, ‘train station’, and ‘Who is this?’ (phone response). These examples of 1980s and 1990s language usage detracted from the efforts made to portray the second world war authentically.

Eric Brown
Bromley, Kent

To too far

Sir: Could you get Dot Wordsworth to devote a column to prepositions, and in particular, the use, or rather misuse, of ‘to’. Sky Sports and the BBC have used ‘defeat to’, rather than ‘defeat by’ and even the Daily Telegraph sub-editors, who I thought of as the last bastion of proper English, have allowed it through. At least there the meaning is clear, and I presume that the journalists concerned, knowing no better, have confused it with ‘lose to’. However, on the BBC news last night, their correspondent, referring to the Burma junta, said that they were ‘suspicious to’ the USA. The use here of ‘to’ rather than ‘of’ pretty much reverses the meaning of what she was trying to say.

John Duffield
Loughton, Essex

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Diary

Rani Singh

I’ve just emerged from the gym, winding down after a day’s writing, when my son Sukhraj calls, alerting me to sudden news of explosions and fatalities in Mumbai.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody

Tamzin Lightwater

Tamzin Lightwater's unique take on the week

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

This battle has just begun

‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram.

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’.

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.