Alison Weir

While extremely glad that Alice Munro should get the serious consideration she deserves, I must take issue with Carol Shields (LRB, 7 February) over her interpretation of ‘Meneteseung’, one of the stories in Friend of My Youth. It is not a case of a middle-aged spinster and a middle-aged bachelor failing ‘to connect’: rather, all the indications, from the outset of the story, are that the main...

SIR: I refer Charles Dicken (Letters, 31 March) to Rubin’s book-Quiet Rage, for an account of the Goetz shooting: not having read the book himself, he is woefully at sea as to the reported facts. None of these young men (half Goetz’s age and all shorter than their attacker) had been convicted of serious crime; only two were carrying screwdrivers, found in their pockets after they had been shot...