Christopher Driver

It must be official: the LRB takes precedence over mere dictionaries. ‘Abbatoir’ is now the correct spelling (see Les Murray’s poem, 8 November 1990).

SIR: As a footnote to John Bayley’s review (LRB, 8 May) – and since there is unlikely to be another biography of Duff Cooper coming along – it seems worth transcribing manuscript notes made on the end papers of my copy of Cooper’s Old men forget by the previous owner, Roger Senhouse. They suggest that the Paris Embassy under the Coopers was not, perhaps, the finest hour of British overseas...

SIR: Though neither an etymologist nor a corsetier, may I hazard a frivolous suggestion for the origin of Barbara Pym’s ‘trollies’ (LRB, 21 February)? James Laver’s Taste and Fashion (1937) illustrates an all-in-one undergarment of the period which seems to have been called a cami-bocker. It does not look very summery, but its upper-and-lower-deck effect, surmounted by two slender shoulder-straps,...

SIR: It is better to think while holding a tomato or a leg of lamb than not to think at all, and Angela Carter (LRB, 24 January) might have been wise to heed Alice Waters’s advice. I thought I had been unlucky when motherhood got in the way of her perpetually forthcoming LRB notice of my The British at Table 1940-1980 a year or so ago, but now I am not so sure. A woman capable of splashing blame...