Bernard O’Donoghue

I was very honoured and gratified (as I am sure Simon Armitage was) by Frank Kermode’s review of the translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (LRB, 8 March). But one adverbial gremlin infected the quotation from my introduction about the rules of alliteration: I don’t say that the first half line ‘originally’ contained three main stresses, which would be entirely wrong, but that it ‘occasionally’...

Charles Monteith’s letter (Letters, 23 November) mildly castigating your testy footnote to Richard Murphy’s protest (Letters, 26 October) came as a relief and made the essential point: writers should be at liberty to use whatever words they like and readers can make it their business to use the dictionary to find out their meanings. Your rather more craven comment on Monteith’s ‘interesting’...