Letters

When Britney Spears totters from a nightclub at 5am—hair askew, often drunk, often without knickers—we assume her behaviour is terribly modern. Certainly Toby Young, who argues we are "lulled by the celebritariat" (December), seems to think so. But celebrities are not new. Nor is our obsession with them, as Prince Charles's 60th birthday portrait, modelled on Victorian hero Frederick Burnaby (1842-85), showed. Burnaby is almost totally forgotten, but in his day he was so famous that the Queen reportedly fainted at news of his death. The Times gave him a 5,000-word obituary. Grown men wept in the street.

Burnaby's exploits make Rambo look wet. Few people have survived frostbite, typhus, an exploding air balloon, poisoning with arsenic; explored Uzbekistan (where it was so cold his beard froze solid and snapped off), led the Household Cavalry, stood for parliament, could speak seven languages, crossed the channel by air, written a string of bestsellers, commanded the Turkish army and founded Vanity Fair; all before an early death aged 42.

But like Britney, Burnaby's actual talents only half explain his fame. Then, as now, media attention was just as important. The readers of the late Victorian era had simple tastes. They wanted what we want: glamour.

Of course, Burnaby did not suffer the indignity of the red carpet. No one dissected whether his body language demonstrated a spat with Gwyneth or Lindsay. But he still had to live up to intolerably high expectations, and fame took a terrible toll. As he entered middle age, he increasingly struggled to keep up with his dashing image. Eventually, the burden became too much. Resolving not to die old, he joined the attempt to rescue Gordon from Khartoum. On leaving, he wrote to his footman: "I am very unhappy… and I can't imagine why you care about life. I do not mean to come back." Sure enough, during an ambush by Sudanese warriors, he pushed through his ranks and rode out alone, determined to meet the public expectation of heroic death. So ended the life of a Victorian icon. Toby Young is right to warn of celebritocracy, but perhaps the real danger is for them, not us.

You can read an expanded version of this letter online here.

Jonty Olliff-Cooper
Conservative party adviser

Lawsonomics
1st December 2008

Mark Lawson's thoughtful essay on culture and the recession (December) is let down by a lapse of language and analysis. According to him, "in Britain… artistic institutions tend to be heavily subsidised by the state."

But any theatre or concert hall manager will tell you a substantial part of their turnover comes from box office and ancillary sales. I know of one well-regarded regional theatre where earned income is 80 per cent of their annual turnover. In 2007-08, total government expenditure was about £587bn. Of that, Arts Council funding was around £409m. So Arts Council spending was just 0.07 per cent of government expenditure. Quite clearly "heavily subsidised" then.

Why do we always talk about the subsidised arts, but never the subsidised police, or the subsidised armed forces? Their funding all comes from the same tax source and the arts actually earn money back—both here and abroad.

Paul Kelly
Poole

Rising renewables
1st December 2008

Richard Barry's hard-hitting report (December) on the stealthy rise of renewables made some good points, but it included a bit of creative accounting. As Barry explains it, the middlemen supply companies roll the costs of buying renewable obligation certificates (ROCs) and paying shortfall fines into our electricity bills without us noticing, and compliant generating companies and suppliers get hefty cashbacks from the fines. Unfortunately, Barry fails to mention that those cashbacks will help to reduce our electricity bills, also without us noticing.

He emphasises how well the financial incentives are working towards achieving government targets, but he does not point to the logical conclusion from this. If and when the targets are met, there will be a surplus of ROCs, so their (marginal) value will vanish and nobody will have to pay any subsidies at all. This is a beautiful built-in market mechanism designed for excessive subsidies to phase themselves out.

Donald Swift-Hook
Woking, Surrey

The curse of Leopold 1
3rd December 2008

I did not recognise the people we regularly deal with in eastern Congo from Tim Butcher's reference to a "post-apocalyptic, feral existence in areas such as the Kivus" (December). During the fighting, we have had daily contact with Henri Ladyi, a Congolese peace activist, by phone and email. We send him running costs through the banking network. It is true that government services are woefully lacking (for example, two policemen with one AK47 between them to police a town of 100,000), but social capital is strong. One Sunday recently a single church congregation collected large amounts of aid for refugees, including six sacks of rice and six bales of clothing.

We seem to need to portray Africans as weak, incapable and in need of western help. But this is a profound distortion, one that prevents us from seeing solutions where they truly exist: in grassroots organisations across Africa.

Carolyn Hayman
Chief Executive, Peace Direct

The curse of Leopold 2
20th November 2008

One wonders if somewhere in the mess Tim Butcher describes, there might not be an upside. Perhaps at least some of what we are seeing is a larger and faster transfer of the west's capital to Africa—capital amassed by China in return for its contribution of cheap consumer goods and even cheaper credit to the west—than the west itself has hitherto permitted via the IMF, or direct foreign aid?

Yes, the bulk of it may be going to elites of failed states who spend more on arms and luxury goods than on development, but hasn't that always been the case with aid from the west? And, given the sheer size of the capital injection, might it not be more likely to spread beyond the capital cities and ruling elites than it has done before?

William Timberman
Via the Prospect blog

The curse of Leopold 3
27th November 2008

Tim Butcher's analysis gets some things right, but some very wrong. It's inaccurate to say this is mainly a resource war and that ethnic tensions in the Congo don't matter. The conflict is driven by access to resources, by Rwanda's greed, by Kinshasa's incompetence, and by longstanding tensions over land and citizenship rights in the Kivus. Disregarding any of these dimensions—as the diplomats, the peacekeepers, and most activists do—results in non-comprehensive peace deals that fall apart quickly, over and over again. There will not be peace in eastern Congo until someone makes a final decision over whether Kinyarwanda-speakers there are citizens, and until some court can sort out the messy land claims issue.

The vast majority who live in the region aren't focused on whether China is getting a cut of the investments. They dislike the Chinese, but only because they bring in their own people to work rather than hiring locals. Most would be perfectly content to let China do what it wants if material life were to improve: if roads and railways were reconstructed, and if they were able to farm in peace.

Laura
Via the Prospect blog

Nature or nurture?
1st December 2008

David Goodhart's article on social mobility (December) is interesting. However, missing from it—and most discussions of this issue—is an important question. We assume ability is more or less randomly distributed throughout society. This may have been true 100 years ago when the division of rich and poor was taken as a God-given fact. But is this still true?

High achievement is a product of both nature and nurture. Since before the last war, there have been opportunities for talent at all levels in society to be discovered and nurtured. But high-achieving individuals tend to seek like mates, and so the genetic endowment on which their offspring draw must be somewhat skewed.

This effect may be so small it is negligible. But I would like to see the issue recognised and addressed, despite its slight aroma of political incorrectness.

Martin Clayton
Via the Prospect website

Joined up Chinese
24th November 2008

Mark Kitto is a bit hard on Ms Shen (December) for her methods of teaching. There's more than one way to write a "b," even in English. Chinese writing is composed entirely of single strokes, though they may be built up into elaborate ideograms. It must be natural for a Chinese child to build up Roman letters in the same way. Trying to impart a cursive style as well as unfamiliar shapes would be an unnecessary complication any wise teacher would avoid.

The pinyin system of writing Chinese with Roman letters is to our advantage and to that of the Chinese; it would be pedantic and time-wasting to insist letters be "joined up." While "joining up" is given great importance in British schools, it often leads to illegibility.

David Leighton
Pewsey, Wiltshire

Fathering the internet
1st December 2008

Peter Bazalgette's article on digital privacy (November) describes Tim Berners-Lee as "the father of the internet." He is not. With his team at Cern, Berners-Lee developed the protocol http and the mark-up language html that form the basis of the web. Vint Cerf, now part of Google's executive team, is probably the only individual who may be regarded as fathering the internet. My apologies for the very English pedantry, but precision is something painfully lacking in current technology debates.

Dan Andrews
Henley-on-Thamess