Letters: In defence of Land Rovers

How to stay safe

Sir: Mary Wakefield is correct to highlight the opprobrium heaped on anyone who suggests sensible safety advice to women (‘Don’t mix up murder and hate crime’, 2 October). It has long been the case that this is the one area where it is impossible to give crime prevention information without stirring up a hornet’s nest.

Motorists are constantly told not to leave valuables on display when they park their cars, as they may return to find their windows broken and the articles stolen. No one claims that motorists are being ‘victim shamed’ when given this advice, even though the police may well roll their eyes when you report the crime and your insurance company may be reluctant to pay out for the damage, because of what they will consider negligence.

Everyone, male or female, should be on their guard in a public place, what self-defence experts used to call ‘condition yellow’: aware of your surroundings, avoiding potential trouble. The utopian society where anyone can walk about with their head in the clouds has never existed and probably never will.

J.A. Stephens

Orpington, Kent

Hard on the Bard

Sir: Ysenda Maxtone Graham is a bit hard on Shakespeare for writing overlong plays (‘Time trial’, 2 October). True he began writing for leisured court performances with plays up to 3,500 lines long, whereas ‘the two-hour traffic of our stage’ can only have been up to 2,500 lines for Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre and the Globe, expanded by the time of the 1623 folio to 3,000 lines.

Expanded plays come in again with the opening of the indoor, warm and lighted Blackfriars Theatre in 1609: there the leisured classes could pay the entrance fees and have the time for expanded efforts, and delight in their more refined taste for lesser post-Shakespearean dramas.

Written by hand

Sir: ‘The creation of manuscripts more or less ceased in the course of the 16th century with the invention of printing,’ Jonathan Sumption writes (‘Smudged with human stories’, 2 October).