Patricia Craig

SIR: It strikes me that perhaps Nicolas Walter is making too much of the ancestry attributed to Major Yeates in the Irish R.M. stories (Letters, 5 June). For Irish, in this instance, I think we read Anglo-Irish, which isn’t quite the same thing – and whatever his nationality, Major Yeates is at a sufficient distance from the natives of Skebawn to find their antics bemusing: this is surely the point....

SIR: In his book Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History, W.J. McCormack tells us – in a rather curious phrase – that Yeats ‘rewrites the terms upon which he would be interpreted’. (He also tells us that when he refers to Yeats he doesn’t mean the ‘biographical individual’, but ‘the summum of texts bearing his name’.) There’s a certain circularity about this statement...

Patricia Craig writes: ‘By the Mane of Aslan’, as Caspian said in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, here we go again. Can we say that, throughput the series, the Pevensies are on the way to heaven – ‘the real Narnia’, of which the shadow-Narnia is simply a foretaste, God and all – and leave it at that?