David Simpson

Lewis Harvey is right to call attention to the bizarre implications of airbrushing the Abu Ghraib photographs (Letters, 3 June). On the one hand, interviews with tortured prisoners have made it very clear that nakedness before others and their cameras is a source of deep shame, and publishing unedited images could only make this worse: this is the best of the reasons given for not releasing the other...

Martin Harries’s websmanship is duly acknowledged (Letters, 8 May): about 853,000 websites linking ‘tragedy’ to 11 September! I’ll wager that few if any of them propose a serious definition or theory of tragedy, first because so many of the dead are deemed to have been ordinary, hence those New York Times obituaries; and then because the ‘foreknowledge of death’ clause applies so unignorably...

I am not the first to note that careful reading is one of the earliest casualties of moments of crisis. So I should not be surprised that Bernard Wasserstein (Letters, 29 November) takes me to be calling for a few more dead Americans! I wish for no more dead bodies of any nation or ethnicity (quite the opposite) but was worrying that the popularity of the ‘ground zero’ terminology might support...