Geoffrey Wheatcroft

‘The rhythm and rhetorical emphasis’ of the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Nicholas Spice writes, is ‘far more effective’ with a conductor (LRB, 16 March). I wonder if he is familiar with Spira mirabilis. This band of young European musicians rehearse symphonic music intensively and lengthily together and then perform it, all without a conductor. I heard them play Beethoven,...

‘In London … Jacobite leaders were being hanged, drawn and quartered before cheering English crowds,’ Neal Ascherson writes (LRB, 15 December 2022). Not quite: those leaders, notably Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino and Lovat, were brought to London to be tried, and were beheaded in 1747, but that peculiarly sanguinary refinement of castration and disembowelment wasn’t enacted in England (apart...

In my review of Harold Evans’s My Paper Chase (LRB, 17 December 2009) I wrote that Lord Thomson, the proprietor of the Times and Sunday Times, ‘had had enough’ of industrial disputes by the time the papers were sold to Rupert Murdoch in 1981, to which Jacob Ecclestone responds that ‘Thomson had indeed “had enough". He died in 1976’ (Letters, 7 January). My consolation, rather than excuse,...

SIR: ‘Britain’s problems, Heath declared in the autumn of 1973, were the problems of success’ (Paul Addison in his review of The Writing on the Wall by Phillip Whitehead – LRB, 23 January). But he did not. I’m not sure how this misattribution has entered educated folklore, along with Voltaire supposedly saying that he disagreed with what you said but … or Goering’s appropriation of the...

SIR: Many of your readers will have smiled at Mr Clive James’s honeyed tribute to the London Review of Books, and also to the late New Review (LRB, 7 November 1985). It was brave of him to write it and brave of you to publish it. The smile was wiped off my own face, however, by the sentence: ‘Grub Street journeymen who could point to no artistic achievement beyond a noseful of burst veins were...