Neil Berry

SIR: The ill-tempered reactions to the Reverend Toby Forward’s pseudonymous short stories, Down the Road, Worlds Away, seem wilfully indifferent to a basic consideration: is Forward’s stuff any good, are his stories worth reading? Instead, the whole ‘argument’ has turned on the question: is a white man entitled to impersonate a young Asian woman writer – or even to write about Asian Britons...

SIR: In his review of Fred Caplan’s biography of Carlyle (LRB, 19 July) Richard Altick endorses Caplan’s opinion that the six-volume life of the Sage of Cheyne Walk by D.A. Wilson published in the 1920s amounts to an ‘historical grotesquerie, a mass of undigested and unevaluated documentation whose main purpose was to prove that Carlyle was a saint and Froude a liar’. This seems to me to be,...