Nicolas Walter

SIR: In his review of Dissentient Voice (LRB, 16 September), Christopher Ricks quotes at length Donald Davie’s attack on E. P. Thompson’s assimilation of the terminology of ‘Dissenting Protestantism’ or ‘Old Dissent’ with the ideology of atheist humanism, but he doesn’t comment on the factual status of Davie’s statement: ‘There truly is a point at which Believer and Unbeliever part...

SIR: Karl Miller spoils his Diary item on the Falklands War (LRB, 3 June) by claiming that ‘so far, with the impressive exception of E. P. Thompson, Nuclear Disarmers have had very little to say on this subject.’ This is not true. The Ad Hoc Committee for Peace in the Falklands was initiated and has been organised by Nuclear Disarmers in the peace movement and the Labour movement in London, and...

SIR: David Lodge should know better than anyone that simple statements about Catholics are generally misleading, yet there is one in his ‘Polish Notebook’ (LRB, 4 February). He reports that ‘practising Polish Catholics resort to abortion as a means of birth control on a large scale,’ and comments that, ‘whereas British Catholics active in the anti-abortion campaign see themselves as trying...

SIR: Marghanita Laski simultaneously demands and disarms criticism of her generalisations about children’s books (LRB, 1 October), by first making such wide claims and then adding so many exceptions and qualifications. She says that children’s books are or should be good for children – whether in encouraging some kind of ethics or in triggering some kind of ecstasy – though she also seems to...

SIR: One question about Michael Korda’s charming book, Charmed Lives, which was played down in the reviews of the original edition and is left out of David Thomson’s review of the paperback edition (LRB, 19 March), really ought to be asked. This is the reliability of what purports to be a work of fact rather than fantasy about the Korda family. I can’t check any of the central narrative, with...