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Letters

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

The other side of the desk
Sir: Those who presume to judge ‘Who’s the worst PM?’ (Letters, 7 June) should reflect on President Kennedy’s deep dissatisfaction with the glib way historians had rated some of his predecessors as ‘below average’ and some as ‘failures’. He said: ‘No one has a right to grade a president — who has not sat in his chair, examined his mail and information that came across his desk, and learned how he made his decisions.’ This rule should apply to prime ministers as well.

Tom Benyon
Bladon, Oxfordshire

Blame Le Corbusier
Sir: Le Corbusier, whom Theodore Dalrymple accuses (Global warning, 7 June) of causing more damage to European cities than Genghis Khan, the Luftwaffe and Bomber Harris combined, uttered one of the most evil phrases of the 20th century. ‘The house is a machine for living in’, a notion taken to heart not only, alas, by French architects but British ones too. It has been the motto of every school of architecture in the country for more than 50 years and more than anything else accounts for the horrific and inhuman environments our urban populations have to live in. Is it surprising that mindless violence is on the increase in those hell-holes of concrete mass-housing, the council estates of south London? If you give people machines to live in, why expect them to behave like humans?

When our architects are required to design an individual house they are completely at a loss. They were never taught the elementary lesson of how to combine a roof with a facade, still less how a facade should be balanced. They have heard of proportion but have no idea that it is based on the human scale. They know nothing of detail, classical or otherwise. They were taught to despise the past, and so have no reference points. They have a trade union, the RIBA, which has a stranglehold on their education and grants them their qualifications. It is high time it was abolished.

John Hoar
South Molton, North Devon

Irony bypass
Sir: Is Paul Johnson (And Another Thing, 31 May) an American or has he merely had an irony bypass? Kingsley Amis’s tongue was never more firmly in his cheek than in his bravura description of Dixon’s hangover in Lucky Jim. To spell it out for Mr Johnson, the reference to ‘filthy Mozart’ is a measure of Dixon’s foul mood, not Amis’s musical taste.

J.M. Hallinan
Linley Point, New South Wales

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Haldane

June 12th, 2008 12:09pm

How strange. All the comments that managed to get posted concerning d'Ancona's interview were negative.Yet here, given pride of place, is a letter praising his clarity of mind. I should say so!

Once again

June 12th, 2008 2:45pm

Dalrymple brutish? What rubbish. Put brutishness in its correct context here. If young scantily clad, drunken women dress like sluts, then so be it - they will be brutally regarded, brutally treated and brutally described as sluts. There is no "nice" word for scantily clad, drunks in public places.

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.