Richard Mayne

Anne Deighton (Letters, 23 April) asks why I use the term ‘Euro-Heresies’ to describe seven British objections to ‘ever closer union’ in Europe. Partly, I admit, to provoke: but mainly because they echo, in a plausibly contemporary form, some of the fictions about European unity that were peddled in the Fifties, usually but not exclusively in Britain.Take the ‘heresy’ which Anne Deighton...

SIR: A printer’s gremlin made my piece on gangsters (LRB, 17 May) unfair to Dashiell Hammett’s record, or his imagination. The stolen property he claimed to have recovered when working as a Pinkerton detective was not a Ferrari wheel, but a Ferris wheel – a more spectacular haul, or boast.

SIR: In your last issue, I may have puzzled a few readers by seeming to say that some Labour candidates for the European Parliament wanted to ‘free’ its powers. In the proof, the word read ‘freee’. Need I add that what I wrote was ‘freeze’?