John Ryle

Is the number of human beings who are dead greater than the number who are alive? Jenny Diski (LRB, 23 June) asks an important question. The answer, by most estimates, is no. For the first time in human history the living outnumber the dead. In the last few decades the scales have shifted: now we outweigh the ancestors. This may be why we are in so much trouble.

Jon Elster has got his signals slightly crossed. It is only at night in Brazil, when the roads are less congested, that drivers routinely cross red lights. The rationale for this is partly the fear of highway robbery: but mostly it is impatience. Drivers do not simply run the lights: they treat the red signal as a caution instead of a halt sign, as if it were flashing amber. Vehicles coming the other...

In his review of Redmond O’Hanlon’s In Trouble Again (LRB, 7 December 1989), Mark Ford speaks of a journey of exploration ‘in search of a remote and ferocious tribe called the Yanomami … reputedly one of the most aggressive peoples on earth’. The Yanomami, according to the reviewer, ‘are said to’ practise female infanticide; their young men engage in bloody ritual battles with gigantic...

SIR: General Gordon – who ‘kept order’ in the Sudan as a whole for just three years – could not, pace Mr MacGregor-Hastie (Letters, 18 July), have spoken of the ‘Christian and animist’ South since at his death Christian missionary activity had barely begun there and ‘animist’ had not yet become an odd-job word for tribes outside the influence of world religions. Also it was Equatoria...