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Letters

Wednesday, 4th June 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Bel canto

Sir: Stephen Pettitt laments the lack of ‘dramatic cogency’ in bel canto opera (Arts, 31 May). But dramatic cogency has never been the purpose of opera. Since singing is not the accepted manner of speaking, opera is, by definition, unrealistic. Unlike theatre, it is not meant accurately to portray emotions, but rather to reflect them through the medium of music. Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti made opera an exhilarating experience by technical and lyrical mastery — something that Wagner’s tiresome Germanic warbling and Birtwistle’s incessant din have never improved upon.

Nicholas Dixon
London E11

Who’s the worst PM?

Sir: I should not dream of challenging so august a source as Christopher Fildes (Letters, 24 May). I can only state that I definitely remember first coming across the Harold Wilson being the worst prime minister since Lord North anecdote in an article written by Bernard Levin for the Times, to which paper he was a regular contributor at the time.

Anyway, be that as it may. As Bertie once said: ‘These are mere straws, Jeeves. Do not let us chop them.’ So Gordon Brown wins the Lord North stakes, showing a clean pair of heels to Harold Wilson, with E. Heath plodding home in third place.

Richard Skilbeck
Newbury, Berkshire

Self-justifying theology

Sir: Nigel Stone is brilliant in exposing Gene Robinson’s self-justifying theology (Letters, 24 May), but the churches’ traditional repudiation of homosexuality does not stand up either. First, there is the rather obvious fact that Jesus himself appears to have been utterly indifferent to homosexual activity. Second, although St Paul condemns it, he also condemns marriage, and women who do not wear hats. Third, Jesus’s very clear statements that Scripture could never be overturned applies to all the Old Testament laws, not just the bit about homosexuality. Unless Christians abstain from, for example, wearing mixed-fibre clothing and eating prawns, their recourse to the Old Testament for moral guidance is as flawed and self-justifying as Robinson’s. Both Robinson and the churches would appear to be creating God in their own image.

David Jones
Amsterdam

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Robert Vincent

June 6th, 2008 11:04am

BUREAUCRATIC NIGHTMARE
As a one-time engineer, soldier, copywriter and publicist,
having found myself the executor of several wills, I realised too late that I'd entered the wrong profession and could have made much more money as a solicitor. The staggering inefficiency and mistakes I encountered among some of them served to make me wonder how they justified their fees.
I thanked God for their clerks.

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

New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected.

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

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.