Robert Hanks

Alex Harvey has misunderstood the denouement of Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer (LRB, 5 May). He writes that the ancient fifth Earl of Gonister, preserved by a diet of fish guts, has become a ‘foetal ape’. That’s the wrong way round. Huxley is playing with the idea of ‘neoteny’: evolution proceeding by the retention of juvenile features, so that the adults of one species resemble the...

The rhyme Gillian Nelson remembers is a music-hall song, written by Thomas and George Le Brunn and sung most famously by Marie Lloyd (Letters, 8 October):Oh! Mr Porter, what shall I do?I want to go to Birmingham,And they’re taking me on to Crewe.Take me back to London as quickly as you can –Oh! Mr Porter, what a silly girl I am.A blue plaque about two hundred yards away from where I’m writing...

Responding to my review of Phil Baker’s life of Dennis Wheatley, Brian McAvera writes that Wheatley’s library ‘wasn’t made up “mainly" of “erotica and modern first editions" – as if that in itself would be a bad thing’ (Letters, 17 February). I don’t think I said it was a bad thing, and in any case I was discussing Wheatley’s collecting habits in the 1920s, as set out by Baker....