Letters

Your regal parapraxis (Will's words, March) reminds me of one I heard years ago. The actress Diana Dors, born Diana Fluck, was visiting her home town to open a garden fête. The vicar introduced her: "The whole country now knows her by her stage name, but it gives me great pleasure to welcome back to Swindon the girl we all here know by her real name: ladies and gentlemen—Diana Clunt."

Stephen Hargrave
London WC1

Parading on our Raine 1
1st March 2007

Terry Eagleton (March) ignores Craig Raine's biography's imperfect richness; instead, with a grumbling clarity that forbids daring reflection, Eagleton insinuates that we need not care what TS Eliot was like. Whatever Eagleton says, our sense of an author does change how we encounter his poetry. Raine's stake in correcting erroneous accounts is reasonable for a poet and expected of a biographer.

Jeremy Axelrod
Contemporary Poetry Review

Parading on our Raine 2
7th March 2007

Terry Eagleton's review is fascinatingly complex, riddled with dark resentments and expressed in startling turns of phrase. It manages to be gossipy while hinting at sincerity beneath the unsubstantiated innuendo. On the subject of meaning, he is very deep. I am still trying to understand his reference to "Eliot's guerrilla raids on the collective subconscious." I suspect Eagleton intends this as a compliment to a poet he otherwise sees as politically squalid. Or does he? Since he is himself above paraphrase and explication, I suppose we will never know.

Eagleton's is no doubt a deliberately provocative piece, but I find myself wondering what could have driven so fine a mind to such petty and involuted nastiness. What is Eagleton's "moral vision?" If it is a virtue to be generous towards others, it will be a long time before he sniffs any incense being wafted in his own direction.

John Fielder
London SE13

Afghanistan's opium
20th March 2007

Jonathan Power's interview with Pervez Musharraf (March) reveals some interesting facts: that the opium harvest in Afghanistan in 2006 was 3,000 per cent higher than in 2001, is worth half Afghanistan's GDP, and makes up 92 per cent of the world's supply of opium; and that having spent £100m in the past three years, Britain has destroyed less than ten per cent of the total opium-growing area.

In this light, the idea of buying up the Afghan poppy crop, as suggested by Musharraf, deserves serious consideration. It can be tested in one or two provinces by appointing subcontractors to buy the crop on behalf of government below market price. This price can be gradually brought down if, at the same time, illegal sales are made more difficult through stricter action. The scheme can then be extended and modified in the light of experience, with part of its cost recovered by selling the opium for medical uses. It would not be easy, but is there a better option for the foreseeable future?

Sartaj Aziz
Former finance minister, Pakistan

A load of old Balls
9th March 2007

Philip Ball (March) veers into inconsistent personal opinion in the global warming debate. He says the latest IPCC report comes as close to blaming humans for global warming as scientists are likely to. True, its summary replaced "likely to be caused by humans" with "very likely," but that is hardly a great stride towards certainty, especially when deeper in the report it says that it is only "likely" that current global temperatures are the highest they've been in the past 1,300 years.

As for "sceptics" saying false and silly things, Ball should look at the alarmist reports about global warming so common in the media. These "climate extremists" are obviously saying false, silly things, as even scientists who adhere to the consensus have begun to notice. And it's data, not economics, that will be the future battleground. The current period of warming began in 1975, yet the very data the IPCC uses shows that since 2002 there has been no upward trend. If this trend does not re-establish itself with force, and soon, we will shortly be able to judge who has been silliest.

David Whitehouse
Farnborough, Hants

Liberal adoption
6th March 2007

Ronald Dworkin (March) urges the government to exempt Catholic adoption agencies from a ban on discriminating against gay couples, arguing that Catholics' discrimination is a matter of faith.

From the outside, it doesn't look like this. Catholics argue that the Bible calls homosexuality a sin. It is true that Leviticus prohibits men from having sex with men. Yet the same book also prohibits the wearing of garments made of more than one type of fibre, and the displaying of tattoos. How does a Catholic who, say, wears mixed-fibre garments decide to ignore some prohibitions but not others? The Bible does not list which prohibitions may be ignored—meaning any basis for ignoring one but not another must lie outside it. In other words, discriminating against homosexuals is not faith, it's a choice, and it looks exactly like prejudice.

Richard Mitchell
Brighton

iPhone ambitions
22nd February 2007

In his defence of the iPhone (Letters, March), Brian Mulholland suggests that Apple alone understands usability. Apple might have mastered computing and portable music, but with just a few months' experience in mobile phone design, why should they have anything more to offer than rivals who have been designing products for years? Let's wait for proof before declaring a winner.

Jessica Figueras
London SE12

The death of recording
7th March 2007

Norman Lebrecht (March) argues that the classical music recording industry has expired. To me, however, it seems both alive and exciting.

The major labels are certainly in trouble. Their classical recordings were subsidised by large profits from pop records, which have largely disappeared. But in their place we have many independent labels profitably producing wonderful recordings using a different financial model. We also have orchestras producing their own recordings. John Eliot Gardiner is, for example, releasing the 200 Bach cantatas on a label owned by his organisation. To suggest, as Lebrecht does, that this amounts to vanity publishing is utter nonsense.

For most of its history, the live performance has been the truest form of music. I prefer to be at the concert; if I cannot, I want the recording to reproduce the concert as closely as possible. That we are now getting more recordings made from live performances is a very exciting development. Lebrecht tells us that he enjoys the feeling of holding a CD in his hands. I still remember, with great nostalgia, carrying home my first record—a 10" 78. But most of us use our ears to enjoy music, not our hands.

Ken Nielsen
Sydney, Australia

Reckoning genocide
22nd February 2007

Timothy Garton Ash (February) refers to Belgrade's attempted "genocide" in Kosovo. If there had been killing remotely approaching this scale, or any ethnic cleansing prior to the bombing, it eluded the 2,000 international observers who had the run of the province. They, of course, were ordered by the OSCE to leave when it became apparent that Nato had opted for war. Only after Nato's occupation did ethnic cleansing unarguably take place, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) being the perpetrators. Even the Hague tribunal which charged Slobodan Milosevic stopped short of adding genocide in Kosovo to his list of charges. As for total deaths in Kosovo, they amounted to 10,000. This figure includes Serbs, as well as Kosovo Albanians murdered by the KLA and "collaterally damaged" Albanian victims of Nato bombing. This is 10,000 too many. But to call it "genocide" is to render the word meaningless.

Yugo Kovach
Twickenham, Middlesex

Illiberal lefts
11th March 2007

Nothing I have encountered since my book What's Left? was published has matched the pettishness of the tantrum David Clark throws in his review (March).

From the beginning, he misleads your readers. What's Left? is not about the toleration of tyrants, which as he says was common enough in the 20th century. It is about liberal and left-minded people making excuses for, turning a blind eye to and, on occasion, openly supporting the movements of the ultra right—a far rarer phenomenon. Clark pretends that all I have done is criticise the merger of the white far left and Islamist far right, and then unfairly brought a charge of guilt by association against mainstream leftists. You would never guess from his review that I look at how Bosnia revealed the dark side of the European temperament and at the failure of social democrats to support those who share their values in the Arab world.

You only have to turn on Channel 4 News to hear supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat-e-Islami dignified as spokesmen for "the Muslims"; liberal broadcasters wouldn't dream of presenting BNP leaders as mouthpieces for "the whites." Your readers know as well as I do that when London is attacked again, the airwaves will be filled with mainstream liberals who will blame Tony Blair rather than argue against a global wave of Islamist violence which is misogynist, homophobic, fascistic and racist.

On the page after Clark's effort, there was a far better piece by Bella Thomas on the condescension displayed by Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma towards Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Garton Ash and Buruma aren't Trotskyists flipping from far left to far right, but bog-standard liberal intellectuals. Yet they turn on a brave woman who has risked her life standing up for the values they profess to believe in. In my book, I explain how they and millions of others are betraying their principles—turning from legitimate horror at the disasters of the Bush administration to a desire to appease a psychopathic threat. My analysis can be criticised. But for criticism to have intellectual integrity, the critic must present an honest summary of the ideas he is attacking.

Nick Cohen
The Observer