Home > The Magazine > The Week

Thursday 4 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Letters

Wednesday, 2nd July 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Take the sheer nonsense of Cummins’s statement that the only indigenous Muslims come from Arabia. Nigerian and Indonesian Muslims and white Anglo-Saxon converts will be startled to discover that the only place where Muslims ‘are native’ is thousands of miles away in the sands of the Arabian peninsular. Just where does he think are Christians native?

To cap it all, Cummins believes that Christians are the ‘rightful owners’ of most Muslims lands and the Crusaders were merely trying to get their own lands back as if all the kings of Europe had some sort of real estate claim to the Near East. Debating the role of Islam and Muslims is one thing, but lauding such incendiary lunacy is quite another.

Chris Doyle
Director, Council for Arab-British Understanding, London EC4

Deeply exposed

Sir: In his review (Books, 14 June) of my book, Forgotten Voices of the Secret War: An Inside History of Special Operations During the Second World War, Andro Linklater bemoans the lack of space devoted to Operation Remorse and to the demise, in France, of the Prosper circuit. I agree with Mr Linklater that it would have been preferable to deal in more detail with Prosper and Remorse. However, it is important to understand why a book of this sort cannot describe in equal depth every aspect of SOE’s work.

The ‘Forgotten Voices’ series is reliant entirely on the recollections of survivors interviewed by the Imperial War Museum. But SOE losses were high, while many protagonists who survived the war did not live long enough to speak of what they did. Nor were all survivors inclined to share their memories, being constrained for a long time by the Official Secrets Act.

Mr Linklater also regrets that several illustrations are blurred. Unfortunately, agents working in enemy-occupied territory were rarely able to take quality photographs.

Roderick Bailey
Imperial War Museum, London SE1

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page

P McNeill

July 3rd, 2008 4:59pm

With regard to Mr. Cummins' remarks about Muslims, it is a sad day when the free world has to listen to tirades that totally counter the pursuit of peace and understanding by people who are obviously more educated on the subject than himself.

Keith Bryer

July 4th, 2008 3:59pm

Chris Doyle's view of the Crusades is bent heavily in favour of the Muslims who invaded the middle east in 700 AD changing it over the next 300 years from a Hellenistic/Roman area into a Muslim one. That was what Pope Urban wanted to reverse by calling for a Crusade. So too did the Byzantine Emperor whose empire had been snatched from his dynasty by newly-enthused Muslim warriors. Cummins was not wrong -- at least on this point.

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Brown bets the farm

The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Pre-Budget Report (PBR) was one of the most arresting political events of modern times.

Diary

Hardeep Singh Kohli

Social networking: surely that has to be a tautology?

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody

Tamzin Lightwater

Tamzin Lightwater's unique take on the week

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’.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

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.

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.