Stephen Sedley

Malcolm Gaskill recounts that in 1944 ‘a myth set in that the soldiers fighting in Italy had it easy: they were, according to a popular song, “The D-Day dodgers”’ (LRB, 8 February). Well, not quite. It was the Tory MP Nancy Astor who had declared in a speech that the troops in Italy (my father was one) were ‘dodging D-Day’. In response a sarcastic song, ‘The D-Day dodgers’, sung to...

In the 1950s, when the contents of country houses and villas that had been requisitioned during the war were being auctioned off in quantity, my father, a solicitor whose office was in Took’s Court (Cook’s Court in Bleak House) off Fetter Lane, would regularly come home with purchases from the nearby second-hand shop, whose proprietor he knew only as ‘the old lady’. She used to buy job...

Fara Dabhoiwala finds it strange that ‘Julian the Black’ didn’t testify in court when he was tried on a capital charge in 1724 (LRB, 23 June). It would have been stranger if he had done so, for until the Criminal Evidence Act 1898 was passed, accused individuals tried in England and Wales could not testify in their own defence. They were limited to cross-examining prosecution witnesses and making...

Julian Hughes asserts that I twice refer to the opponents of assisted dying (he puts the expression in inverted commas, presumably to cast doubt on its genuineness) as ‘doctrinaire’ (Letters, 18 November).Doctrinaire, with its implication of following a teaching to untenable extremes, is not a word that appears anywhere in my article. When I spoke at two points of doctrinal opponents of, or opposition...

Rosemary Hill’s evocative piece about Lyons Corner House brought to mind the time in the 1950s when my uncle Fred was in Gloucester Royal Infirmary (LRB, 20 February). In the next bed was an old lag from the local prison. Uncle Fred asked him what he was in for. ‘Oh nothing much,’ he said. ‘I just popped into Joe Lyons for a cup of tea and an overcoat.’When the Lyons family’s greatest legal...