E.S. Turner

Touching on the hazards of fraternisation with the ex-enemy in postwar Germany, Richard Wollheim says: ‘Every day the army cooks were instructed to step up the bromide ration in the tea until the taste was bitter, and the spoon stood virtually upright in the billycan’ (LRB, 4 December). The notion that the Army ‘put something in the tea’ to deaden priapic urges has long been as popular as it...

In a cogent piece by Stephen Sedley I find this: ‘A judge sitting without a jury has no alternative but to look at the evidence she is offered.’ I am used to seeing God referred to as She, but why is a Lord of Appeal joining in the tease?

Responding to my review of Dr Eckener’s Dream Machine, J.F. Darycott (Letters, 3 January) refers to recent research suggesting that the cause of the Hindenburg disaster was the highly flammable coating on the ship’s fabric which resulted in a rapid spread of flames along its length. Douglas Botting, the book’s author, mentions this theory, and gives ‘discharges of an electrostatic nature’...

E.S. Turner writes: I suppose we shall never know why Sir Osbert Sitwell thought Queen Mary’s style to be Rumanian. Oddly enough, at the time of Edward VIII’s abdication, the Queen is supposed to have exclaimed ‘Really, we might as well be in Rumania!’; presumably she was thinking of King Carol and Mme Lupescu. This, of course, is irrelevant to the point at issue.