Letters

While not everyone will agree with Dean Godson's analysis of the history of Northern Ireland (November), one cannot doubt his passion. A few years ago, when Godson and I were colleagues at the Telegraph, the comment editor found a passionate dissection of the political situation in Northern Ireland sitting on Godson's desk. "I enjoyed your column on Northern Ireland," the editor later told him. "That was not for publication," an indignant Godson replied, "that was a letter to my mother!"

Simon Hogg
London SW12

Taking sport seriously
29th November 2007

Following yet another dismal British sporting year, David Goldblatt's essay (December) was timely. While I agree that the sociocultural influence of sport must be taken more seriously in Britain—particularly in relation to national self-esteem—we need to take an even broader view. Sport-related expenditure may account for as much as 2.5 per cent of GDP. Jobs and livelihoods, in addition to social wellbeing, are dependent upon our nation's sporting successes. The problem is that policy has been largely dominated by the fitness agenda, rather than by a clear understanding of the role sport plays in Britain today. We supposedly have the best football league in the world but do not really know what this means, and our hosting of the Olympics has resulted more in cynicism than celebration.

Simon Chadwick
Coventry University

Biased against boys 1
29th November 2007

I was somewhat disturbed by Charlotte Leslie's nostalgia (December) for gender polarity. I can't see that our society is at all "feminised," as Leslie claims, or that the so-called "male virtues" she identifies have been devalued. In fact, despite the decline of manual labour, our culture continues to valorise male strength, from the media glamorisation of gang culture and gun crime to the violence of drunken young men on our streets.

Martyn Rogers
SOAS

Biased against boys 2
6th December 2007

Leslie speculates about aspects of modern life that might account for boys doing less well in school than girls. But it sounds to me like schools in Britain are just like my rural school in Kansas 50 years ago, where the girls did best academically. What may have changed is what girls do with their education. I asked the most brilliant girl in our maths class if she was going to college. No, she said, she was engaged to be married. I went on to earn a PhD in maths.

Glenn Shafer
Newark, New Jersey

Divided on genre
27th November 2007

Tom Chatfield (December) says "the best genre fiction is both vicarious and predictable." If by "best" he means "bestselling" then this is a function of the genre buyers rather than genre fiction itself, and consequently an unsurprising observation. If "best" indicates an aesthetic judgement of genre fiction, then Chatfield's qualification—that "it offers a subtle refinement of known thrills"—can be interpreted either so broadly that the claim is trivial, or more narrowly so that it is false.

Take Borges, Ballard and Vonnegut, all of whom have written extensively within the science fiction genre: "The Library of Babel," High Rise and Slaughterhouse-Five would only be classed as predictable by unrealistically exacting standards and are not vicarious in any pejorative sense of the word. Science fiction writers who are more standardly considered part of the canon, such as Asimov, Clarke and Dick, write works that are replete with original, unpredictable ideas. Indeed, the better works in the genre use such ideas to give us insight into the human condition—an insight that we typically praise literary fiction for providing us with.

Duncan Watson
Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Iranian cinema
15th November 2007

Mark Cousins's analysis of Iranian cinema is hugely problematic (October). His contention that the banning of the "depictions of sexual activity or longing" has "produced some of the glories of modern cinema" is highly dubious. But more importantly, Cousins has conflated the Sharia-sanctioned misogynistic airbrushing of Iranian women—individuals capable of all too human tenderness and sexuality—with what he considers to be the desirable absence of the "male gaze." Moreover, it is worth remembering that cinematic depictions of sensuality and sexual shenanigans take us towards the explorations of class, political economy and bourgeois sensibilities. Why do you think Luchino Visconti "gazes" so lovingly at the beauty of the impoverished but aristocratic Delon and the parvenu and sexually coy Cardinale? The gazing and the subliminal sexuality of The Leopard have much to do with the Sicilian experiences of moving from feudalism into early capitalism, and next to nothing to do with Visconti (a gay man) gawping and thus demeaning Cardinale.

Sasan Samiei
Lewes, East Sussex

Canon anxiety 1
27th November 2007

Richard Jenkyns (December) makes the same problematic conflation of two distinct issues as Jonathan Sacks: the idea and role of the canon, and multiculturalism. Suppose the role of a canon is taken as effective in the formation of an integrated society. In this case, multiculturalism is beside the point, since there is no reason that the canon itself cannot be "multicultural." But suppose the response is that with such a canon, there will be a problem with people's lack of identification with its sources. Then, again, multiculturalism is beside the point, because vast sections of British society—for example, those not black and brown and from other places—lack knowledge of and inclination towards a canon as conceived in the Oxonian tradition. Go to Windermere: it is full of Indians from the professional classes who grew up on the Lake poets; you will not find many working-class whites there. To whom does a canon belong, and what is that canon? Facile assumptions about form and function merely mask a rather ethnocentric view of culture, and offer no real engagement with the possibilities of a pluralistic conception of evolving national culture—and the power of intellectual cultivation within it.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Lancaster

Canon anxiety 2
28th November 2007

When Prospect covers politics, economics or science, the discussion is relevant to the world as it is today. You would not give space to a long-retired Whitehall fogey arguing that we should protect our colonial interests in Rhodesia. So why give Richard Jenkyns a platform to rehash cobwebbed rhetoric about the arts? It's obvious that this old Oxonian believes high culture came to an end decades, if not centuries, ago. I suppose it did, if we accept Jenkyns's definition—the fantasied "glad day" when Prince William might attend a recital at the Wigmore Hall. Yes, Tony Blair is a philistine. But not because he likes modern music; rather because his choices from within this rich sphere are facile and unadventurous. In this he is no different from 99 per cent of politicians in any century.

Michel Faber
Ross-shire

New thinking on nukes
23rd November 2007

As Ian Kearns says in his timely article on the need to start getting rid of nuclear weapons (December), it is not only Kissinger, Schultz, Nunn and Perry who think that we have avoided using them largely through luck. This was made clear in November, when a UN disarmament committee considered a motion calling for all nuclear weapons to be taken off a state of high alert. The motion was carried almost unanimously, with only three nations voting against it: Britain, the US and France. Both America and Russia hold between 2-3,000 nuclear weapons on a state of high alert. They should be called to stand down immediately.

Jim McCluskey
Twickenham

A challenge on liberty
26th November 2007

A recently published study by Liberty demonstrated that Britain's current 28-day limit on pre-charge detention is already much longer than the limit in comparable democracies. In his article "Taking liberties" (Prospect online, December), Alex Carlile, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, seeks to dismiss this as "mere campaigning zeal." In fact, his article demonstrates how far the few remaining supporters of longer pre-charge detention have to go to justify any extension at all. I make no apology for our campaign against a proposal which is unjustified, will lead to injustice and may prove counterproductive.

You can read the full text of this response to Alex Carlile online here.

Shami Chakrabarti
Director, Liberty

The real GM food scandal 1
28th November 2007

David Goodhart's editorial (November) champions turning the tide of "back to nature" sentiment in Britain so that we can reconsider the safety of GM crops. Yet he also associates concern about GM crops with the organic debate. Can't GM foods be grown organically? By lumping them together, you seem to be unconsciously expressing the fear that we either choose "natural" or "Frankenstein" food, presumably with a decent coating of pesticides. Dick Taverne's article itself mentions that GM crops reduce the need for pesticides; organic producers demonstrate that they aren't needed where proper soil husbandry exists.

Helen Monk
London N3

The real GM food scandal 2
6th December 2007

Isabel Norval's letter (December) about the sterile maize in Africa repeats a myth. The "terminator" seeds have not been marketed yet. If they were to be commercialised, it would probably be in developed markets that can afford a hefty premium: subsistence farmers cannot pay premium prices for seed. Worries about sterility genes damaging biodiversity are also unfounded. Sterile plants do not transmit damaging (or any other) traits to offspring. Your correspondent seems to think all GM seed sold is sterile. In fact, none is.

Tim Roberts
Bracknell, Berks