Nicolas Walter

SIR: Frank Kermode mentions a few of the minor errors which have understandably but regrettably survived to mar Richard Ellmann’s posthumous Oscar Wilde (LRB, 29 October). A less minor error concerns the wording of the Marquess of Queens-berry’s famous card which was delivered at Oscar Wilde’s club in February and which precipitated Wilde’s prosecution of Queensberry and thus his own downfall....

SIR: Sheila Jones’s correction of Lord Kennet’s claim (LRB, 8 January) that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was not unilateralist when it ‘was first founded’, at the beginning of 1958, needs some amplification and clarification. He is wrong to say the CND became unilateralist ‘within a year or so’, and she is right to say that all the speakers at the inaugural public meeting on 17...

SIR: I am not convinced by Barbara Everett’s reply to my letter (Letters, 22 January). She says that ‘it is desirable to have good modern – i.e. modernised – texts of all the older writers,’ but that ‘scholars and critics’ need ‘the earliest printed texts’ or manuscripts. No doubt: but surely any readers who are able to appreciate the older writers are able to understand and are likely...

SIR: Patricia Craig says in her review of Gifford Lewis’s book Somerville and Ross (LRB, 17 April) that the hero (or victim) of the experiences of the Irish RM is ‘an amiable Englishman’. Similar statements were widely made at the time of the recent television series based on some of the stories. Yet Major Yeates himself says at the beginning of his first adventure (‘Great Uncle McCarthy’)...

SIR: Just a brief comment on Donald Hawes’s correction (Letters, 6 March) of my correction of A.N. Wilson. I think there is room for argument about whether someone whose huge output of essays, plays and poems included a couple of hymns may be called a ‘hymn-writer’, or about whether the younger Thomas Arnold was familiarly referred to as ‘Tom Arnold’ like his famous father. And I know perfectly...