Andy Beckett

I’m puzzled by Rhys Crilley’s suggestion that my piece about Los Angeles in the 1960s should have taken into account ‘the way the city is represented in hip hop’, as a place of ‘inequality, racism, violence and police brutality’ (Letters, 18 March). My piece was about precisely those things, except for hip hop, because in the 1960s hip hop didn’t exist. When lockdown permits, he’s welcome...

Stephen Sedley repeats in passing a couple of common ideas about Chile that need qualifying (LRB, 24 June). He describes the way that people divided against each other during the Pinochet dictatorship as a ‘mystery’, given the apparent civility of modern Chile. It is less of one if you consider the Chilean civil war of 1891, the attempted and actual military coups of the 1920s and 1930s, and the...

Theresa Heine (Letters, 8 August) makes a fair point about the rarely mentioned political diversity of the Chilean Army in her response to Christopher Hitchens’s review of my book, Pinochet in Piccadilly. Besides the pro-democratic General Carlos Prats, whose dismissal she correctly cites as an important prelude to Pinochet’s coup in 1973, René Schneider, another Chilean general who believed that...