Francis FitzGibbon

A footnote to Frederick Wilmot-Smith’s excellent artice about legal aid (LRB, 6 November). It was Kenneth Clarke, as lord chancellor in 2012, who summed up the ideological basis for destroying legal aid when he told the International Bar Association: ‘What we mustn’t do is just leave untouched a system that has grown astonishingly, making the poor extremely litigious.’ Grayling inherited his...

SIR: I was surprised to read the following remark in Mr Sillitoe’s article ‘Writing and Publishing’ (LRB, 1 April): ‘The only good writing emerging from that country [i.e. Russia] appears from the prison camps.’ It follows that all Soviet writers not in camps are not good writers. He must also have a low opinion of writers such as Pasternak or Bulgakov, who did not serve terms in camps. Maybe...