Paul Taylor

Since it is impossible to say how many people should go to university, the Government's target of 50 per cent of all those between 18 and 30 must have been selected for its electoral appeal, Stefan Collini tells us (LRB, 6 November). His tone is accusatory, as if this were a cynical ploy, but given the general tone of its other policies, that the Government should base its appeal to the electorate...

Thomas Laqueur writes (LRB, 29 July) that a medical textbook becomes obsolete within five years. In fact the information in a textbook may be out of date long before the book is published. The routine use of streptokinase in myocardial infarction, for example, began to be advised in textbooks in 1987, 13 years after an analysis of the published clinical trials would have revealed clear and compelling...

John Sturrock (LRB, 29 April) might be interested to learn that one anagram of ‘London Review of Books’ is ‘no wind of rebel Kosovo’.

Peter Campbell’s piece on medical imaging (LRB, 31 July) expressed a wish to know more about the mathematics of tomography. The problem is to reconstruct an image of a slice through a body from a set of readings, known as projections, taken as an X-ray source and detector are routed in a circle around the slice. If we know what is in a body we can calculate what will happen to an X-ray that passes...

John Lanchester (LRB, 20 March) suggests that doctors believe we drink twice as much as we let on. The evidence supports the doctors: according to an article published in the journal Addiction in 1995, no counterfeit production or illegal importation of alcohol exists on the island of Spitzbergen, so a comparison of figures for the sale of alcohol with the islanders’ self-reported consumption allows...