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, 9th July 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Politically, his confused cocktail of old Labour attitudes, commitment to value for money and weak grasp of management accountancy is at the root of current economic failure. But the great tragedy of Brown is that although he is bright and intelligent he is not as bright as he thinks he is and he has an emotional intelligence nearing zero. He has, from childhood, been allowed to believe that he was especially gifted, cleverer than those around him and, for the past decade, cocooned in the Treasury unchallenged and surrounded by sycophants like the unspeakable Ed Balls. If only Blair had not surrendered social policy exclusively to the Treasury and moved Brown on to other, more difficult portfolios such as Defence or Foreign Affairs, the New Labour story might look very different today.

Dr Derek Hawes

Epping, Essex

Try before you buy

Sir: Charles Moore’s wife (The Spectator’s Notes, 5 July), in refusing to pay the postal surcharge on an unfranked postcard after she had looked at it, exactly explains why the penny post was invented. Before postage stamps, which for the first time introduced paying at the point of departure, and not on arrival, punters invented all sorts of canny codes to go on the outside of the letter. The recipients, having read the codes, politely returned the letter to the postman, saying they didn’t wish to pay to receive it, and the postman departed empty-handed.

Dominic Low

Fakenham, Norfolk

Not mocked

Sir: I would like to think that it did not occur to you for one moment that the front cover of your last issue would be deeply offensive to Russian, Greek or any other Orthodox Christians. I can understand that we are such a small minority that we can be safely disregarded, but ‘God is not mocked’ as St Paul teaches. Icons are holy objects that depict holy people, and treating them in this sacrilegious way brings its own consequences.

Nicholas K. Rushton

Liverpool

Break point

Sir: I am surprised that Roger Alton (Sport, 5 July) fell, like most of the media, for the obvious over Alla Kudryavtseva’s claim that ‘I don’t like her outfit’, especially as he is no fan of Maria Sharapova. It took Tracy Austin to point out what every woman watching must surely have realised, when she told John McEnroe and Sue Barker, ‘I think she meant to say something else.’ I would go further and suggest that Kudryavtseva meant to say something less — with ‘outfit’ being the extra word.

Clarke Hayes

Hastings, East Sussex

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3

Anonymous Mark II

July 10th, 2008 8:09am

Instead of simply printing Harry Cummins' letter, why does the Spectator not commission him to write a series of articles on Islam? God knows, this magazine publishes enough taqiyya from Moslems and their enablers, as per the latest drivel about Sharia. I know a great deal about Islam but my statements, backed up by correct references and accreditations to the Koran, ahadith and sira, are not printed in the readers' comments because they illustrate perfectly that there is no moderation in Islam, that it is an intolerant, violent, seditious political ideology and that this continued talking around but never about the subject, is insulting to your readership and ultimately treasonable because it leaves the readership withoout the necessary knowledge to reach certain conclusions and take certain steps to preserve their nation, institutions and security. BTW, I'm not the same 'Anonymous' who in a Melanie Phillips' thread a few days back, also complained of being censored by the Spectator when he/she tried to mention Muhammad. We are Legion, it seems.

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.