Nicolas Freeling

Elspeth Barker wrote in warm praise (LRB, 9 April) of Robert Liddell’s Stepsons, which plainly merits this. She emphasises the writer’s refusal to snipe at an easy target: ‘nothing cheap here.’ Is it not painfully out of key then to lash the pathetic ‘Elsa’ with her own scorn? The dim middle child, the Prussian boots, the ‘Gerwoman’ of whom ‘kindly aunts’ were to say: ‘Never call...

I do wish to say that having E.S. Turner’s ‘Turbot, sir’ is by itself worth a year’s subscription.