David Carpenter

Thomas Nagel’s piece about J.L. Austin prompts recollection of his role in Oxford’s 1938 ‘Munich’ by-election, in which the Conservative candidate was Quintin Hogg (LRB, 7 September). Austin coined the slogan ‘A vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler.’ A.J.P. Taylor, his colleague at Magdalen College, remarked that this was the only one of Austin’s propositions he ever understood.

Ian Mortimer says that ‘no one has yet demonstrated a fault’ in his argument for Edward II’s survival (Letters, 5 July). I had thought my review of his book The Perfect King had demonstrated a series of them. I am at a loss to understand why it is illegitimate to consider what possible motive Roger Mortimer had for faking Edward’s death, especially as I was responding to Ian Mortimer’s own...