WIFE-BEATING NO JOKE
20th April 2003
The cartoon making a joke about violence against women was disgusting ("The baron left his wife-beating to the butler," cartoon, May). Is it funny that one woman in four in Britain faces domestic violence? Is it funny that every year 100 women are murdered by partners or ex-partners? If we want a society where there is less violence against women and children, we must stop treating it as a joke.
Helen Goodman
London NW1
END OF THE AFFAIR
18th April 2003
In "End of the affair," (May) Rodric Braithwaite implies that the uncoupling of British foreign policy from that of the US would be almost cost-free, noting that only Ted Heath had put Europe above the US. Heath did indeed tell the Americans that Britain wanted no special privileges denied to the rest of the EEC. He was taken at his word. During the Yom Kippur war, in order to deter the Soviets from intervening, Nixon raised nuclear alert to Defcon III, the level just below war. The British received only 20 minutes' warning. Heath was furious.
Kathleen Burk
Harwell, Oxfordshire
UNIVERSE EXPANSION
17th April 2003
AJ Kerron (Letters, May) raises the question of how, given Einstein's dictum that objects with mass cannot travel faster than light, the universe could have been millions of light years apart early in its history. The answer is that we are dealing with the expansion of space itself; light and all mass is swept along with it and so the cosmic speed limit does not apply.
CJ Lintott
Magdalene College, Cambridge
FERRARI AND THE AFGHANS
17th April 2003
I was interested to read in "In fact" (May) that the total annual budget of the Afghan government is $460m, and that this figure equates to about half the monthly US military spend in Afghanistan. Trivia fans might be interested to know that this figure also approximates to the total annual budget of the Ferrari Formula 1 team in 2002 ($443.8m, according to F1 Racing magazine, of which I am editor in chief).
Matt Bishop
London SE1
BRUMMIE MUSLIMS 1
6th May 2003
Bruce Clark's piece about British Muslims (May) is interesting but wrong. Secular westerners' disagreement is not with Islam as such but with the way it is practised by most Muslims. As a "secular westerner," I am able to have conversations with Christian friends at the deepest levels because I am not dismissed as an infidel. Many of my other friends have turned away from Christianity but do not risk being killed by those who have not.
Mike Davies
London SE9
BRUMMIE MUSLIMS 2
24th April 2003
Two points emerge from Bruce Clark's essay. The first is that the attitude of the Muslim faithful is informed by a deep, immovable, and a priori hatred of the Christian. This indeed was my experience during two winters living at close quarters with Arab revolutionaries in the Maghreb some decades ago. The second point is that it is the duty of the Christian world to cure this malaise. The method proposed is to court the Muslims by tolerance, sympathy, and to avoid any sort of act that they might construe as offensive. According to this view no such duty seems to be incumbent on the Muslims. The bien-pensant idea is essentially all for them and nothing for us. It is difficult to find decent language to describe the stupidity of such an attitude.
Herb Greer
Salisbury
TRAVEL WRITING
20th January 2003
Edward Marriott's article (January) on travel writing omits to mention one of the greatest travel writers ever, Norman Lewis. I realise that all writers of that genre cannot be listed in a short article, but Lewis's books about his travels in Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are definitive works on the people and places in that region. The last, An Empire of the East, was published by Marriott's own publisher Picador.
David Koblick
Steyr, Austria
IMMIGRATION MATHS
5th May 2003
Bob Rowthorn (Letters, April) cites the government actuary saying that net immigration at present levels has little effect on the age structure. The figures cited show that the government actuary expects those over 65 to be at least 51 per cent of the economically active population with no net immigration and no more than 44 per cent if immigration continues. That seems quite significant.
David Paul
Bromley, Kent
EXTREME MALES
30th April 2003
Is Simon Baron-Cohen's article (May) on autism an example of postmodern irony? He surely cannot be serious in his concern that "as society becomes more female, there is less tolerance for those who cannot empathise." After 10,000 years of institutional devaluation by patriarchal cultures dominated by big bickering boys with an empathy deficit, isn't it time for the emotionally literate to have a say?
Stewart Dakers
Aldershot
AUSSIE UNIVERSITIES
23rd April 2003
The link, if any, between student fees and university attendance from low-income students is as controversial in Australia as in Britain. The difference is that Australia has been charging all students since 1989, providing more empirical evidence on the subject. The letter on this subject from Julie Wells (March) repeats a common mistake. She cites the low-income attendance figures put out by the education department. These do not, however, measure participation rates. They tell us what proportion low-income students are of the total student population. What we need to know is what proportion of the low-income group is going to university. Studies conducted by the Australian council for educational research found that between 1980 and 1999 university attendance rates for children of unskilled workers increased from 13 per cent to 25 per cent, and for children of clerical workers the rates went from 24 per cent to 32 per cent. These improvements are obscured by the figures Julie Wells provides, because middle-class university participation also increased significantly. This meant that the relativities remained much the same, even as the absolute numbers went up.
Andrew Norton
Carlton, Australia
THE RESOURCES CURSE
21st April 2003
The fascinating article by Daniel Litvin (May) on the damage that conflicts of interest over oil may do to postwar Iraq points to a wider problem: the curse of natural resources. Countries with large endowments of resources other than oil-diamonds, gold, natural gas, fertile land-have also been riven by squabbles over their ownership: Sierra Leone, Angola, South Africa, much of Latin America, and, in recent years, Russia. Fights over ownership absorb entrepreneurial energies that might otherwise go to building up agriculture or manufacturing industry. I suspect there are counter-examples: Britain in the 18th century, where large reserves of coal fuelled the industrial revolution, may be one; the US in the 19th century may be another. It might help potential nation-builders in Iraq or elsewhere to study such cases to see if there are ways in which the curse of national resources can be turned into a blessing.
Julian Le Grand
London School of Economics
LYNCHING OF LOMBORG
10th April 2003
John Kay (April) is right about the way in which Bj?rn Lomborg has been pilloried by his fellow Danes. It is actually even worse than Kay imagined. There are three Danish committees concerning scientific dishonesty, covering health, social affairs and natural sciences. All reviewed Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist. Although they found the book guilty of dishonesty, they specifically failed to find Lomborg himself personally guilty. Quite how the eminent scientists managed to distinguish between the words of a book and the author who wrote those same words was never made clear; but the end result certainly gave support to the Economist's description of the case as "Orwellian." Kay describes the committees' findings as evidence of "tribal loyalty." Living in Denmark, I very much agree. Lomborg is young, articulate (in both Danish and English), media-savvy, free-thinking and daring in his willingness both to range beyond his field and speak his mind loudly. The last two traits in particular break the unwritten rules of Denmark's well-organised, but pigeonholed, society.
Robert Satchwell
Haarby, Denmark
UNORIGINAL ART 1
7th April 2003
There is a flaw in Patrick Lyndon's argument (April) about the legitimacy of copying artworks. Painting and sculpture are different from music, theatre and dance for the reason that a musical score, the script of a play or the choreology used to notate dance are not the "thing in itself." A painting, on the other hand, is the artist's realisation of his or her vision, the finished article. A musical composition begins as an idea in a composer's imagination but is only realised at the point where it is played. The medium that translates it from the former state to the latter is the score, and although the original score may give the best clues as to what the composer intended, it is still a set of instructions for realising the work rather than the work itself. Painters need no third party to realise their work for them, and if someone attempts to do just this, then we call it a copy. Music (like theatre and dance) is an ephemeral art: each performance is a unique realisation of a work, which exists dynamically in time and space rather than statically on a printed page or painted canvas. As such, a particular performance cannot be "copied." Recording preserves a single performance, a particular moment in time.
Lyndon is right: music, like painting, is a communicating art, but much of what it communicates is connected to our knowledge of the work as the creation of a particular individual. With an original painting, the fact that we know the artist was in physical contact with this canvas brings with it a sense of being in his or her physical presence; and with a copy, that connection is lost. Authors may be absent from their texts, but with a copied painting, the author was never there in the first place.
Steve Halfyard
Birmingham Conservatoire
UNORIGINAL ART 2
8th April 2003
In support of Patrick Lyndon, I recall my own experience as a student in Rome in 1964. In that year there was an exhibition to mark the 400th anniversary of Michaelangelo's death. It did not include a single original work. Instead it showed reproductions of every major work of his, from alabaster copies of his sculptures to, sometimes, just black and white photographs of his paintings. I went every day for a week. And I would still say, 39 years later, that I was more inspired by seeing his complete body of work in this way than I have been by any exhibition of originals I have seen since.
Martin Mayer
Westoning, Bedfordshire
