Liam Shaw

‘When an experimental result is described as statistically significant,’ John Whitfield writes, ‘that usually means a statistical test has shown there is a less than 5 per cent chance that the difference between that result and, for example, the corresponding result in a control experiment is attributable to random variation’ (LRB, 7 October). Not quite. It means that under the assumption the...

Christopher Tayler seems to think that Patrick O’Brian was ‘a bit odd’ as a name and suggests that O’Brien would have been a more convincingly Irish spelling (LRB, 6 May). Maybe now, but not in the period O’Brian was obsessed with. The 1841 Census for England and Wales records 58 instances of O’Brien in the London area. Of these, 42 (72 per cent) were Irish-born people or their descendants....

Tom Stevenson notes that the fact V2s were built by slaves was ‘overlooked’ when Wernher von Braun was brought to America (LRB, 4 March). The systematic plundering of German technical expertise went way beyond rocket scientists. The historian John Gimbel noted in 1990 that fear of the Russians was merely an acceptable public excuse for ‘riding roughshod over American denazification policies’....