Mat Pires

Alan Rudrum believes that Jesus needed an ass to get into Jerusalem not because he was suffering a pleural effusion, as Roger James has it, and not because of his innate humility, as Frank Kermode suggests, but ‘because of Zechariah 9.9’, a concordance which, he asserts, also handily demonstrates that the New Testament is ‘latent in the language of the Old’ (Letters, 22 May). Rudrum is not...

Retort cast doubt on the idea that oil resources might be reaching their peak (LRB, 21 April). They say, correctly, that oil statistics are notoriously unreliable, but then list a number of elements which they do not evaluate – indeed, which one cannot evaluate, as things stand – to support a ‘rather different picture’: ‘vast’ resources in the West African Gulf States, deep-water fields...

Those who share John Sutherland’s worries about copyright ownership (LRB, 7 January) may be interested in a ruling made in a Paris court on 14 April. It concerned a two-year archive that the Figaro has set up on the Minitel, an on-line service which has existed in France since the early Eighties. The Syndicat National des Journalistes and eight Figaro writers argued that the fee they’d been paid...

Where is the evidence that Knut Hamsun was ‘Céline’s great influence’, as James Wood asserts (LRB, 26 November 1998)? Céline scholars, certainly, seem unaware of this: in three volumes of biography Gibault doesn’t mention Hamsun once; Alméras fleetingly evokes a ship in Guignol’s Band, the Kong Hamsun; while Godard concedes that the Norwegian’s habit of novelising his own experience...

The slogan chanted by French football supporters after their World Cup victory should be in the order ‘black-blanc-beur’, not ‘blanc-black-beur’ as Anand Menon had it (LRB, 12 November). It is a militant response to the Front National’s co-option of the tricolour for their annual Fête du bleu-blanc-rouge. In any case, the jubilant fans didn’t chant that, they chant ed ‘Zidane for President’....