Nicolas Walter

SIR Linda Colley’s review of Joel Wiener’s biography of Richard Carlile (LRB, 1 November) includes three unpleasant and unsubstantiated remarks about Carlile and sex in successive sentences. She says that ‘Carlile abused his wife.’ If this means that he said rude things about her, it is true, though he seems to have had good reason. If it means that he used violence against her, it may be true,...

SIR: Neal Ascherson says of Ken Livingstone’s political position in his review of John Carvel’s Citizen Ken (LRB, 7 June) that ‘in most ways, he is more of a classical anarchist than a Marxist.’ It is hard to think of any way in which he is a classical or any other kind of anarchist. It is true that at one time in the 1960s he subscribed to Solidarity – although, contrary to what Carvel says,...

SIR: David Leigh says in his review of books on the Secret Service (LRB, 4 August) that ‘the secrecy game started to collapse in the mid-1970s, because of events in the United States.’ He has got it more than ten years late, and back to front. The process began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and in Britain. Secrecy about both the Security Service and the Secret Service was eroded during the...

SIR: Brigid Brophy’s review of Stephen Coote’s Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (LRB, 21 April) contains a reference to James Kirkup’s poem ‘The love that dares to speak its name’ which deserves expansion and explanation. She says that the book contains ‘a note simply stating why the text of the blasphemy-case poem is not printed’. The note is as follows: ‘Gay News was successfully...

SIR: The references to Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary in Peter Medawar’s review of Robert Nisbet’s Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (LRB, 2 December 1982) include a general one to ‘the anti-religious, anti-clerical coloration of Voltaire’ and a particular one to what he calls its ‘best-known passage’ in the article ‘Tout est bien’, beginning: ‘Either God wishes to expunge...