Simon Skinner

Ben Walker’s reflections on VAR invite the observation that VAR’s problem is not the technology (which we love to doubt), or the people who operate it (whom we love to demonise), but the relationship between VAR and the on-pitch referee it is supposed to be helping (LRB, 22 February). VAR’s original sin is surely its insistence that the referee remains sovereign. As Walker says, IFAB guidelines...

The note accompanying Thomas Jones’s reflections on generational attitudes to Armageddon says that he ‘edits the LRB blog from a secure bunker, in an undisclosed location’ (LRB, 5 April). I believe previous leaks have disclosed that his bunker is in Orvieto, and he will therefore almost certainly know about – and if not, would certainly relish a trip to – the former nuclear bunkers at Monte...

It was important to be reminded by R.W. Johnson that Clement Attlee – executive midwife of the National Health Service, Town and Country Planning, as well as the nationalisation of coal, the railways and canals, iron and steel, the Bank of England and civil aviation – should have regarded ‘Indian independence’ as his administration’s ‘greatest achievement’ (LRB, 11 September). That he...

Julian Bell writes drolly to protest John Lanchester’s characterisation of the current political high command as white men in their forties with humanities degrees from Oxford, on the grounds that Nick Clegg is a white man in his forties with a humanities degree from Cambridge (Letters, 17 March). The wider question is whether these are men with ‘humanities’ degrees in any received sense of that...

Julian Bell writes drolly to protest John Lanchester’s characterisation of the current political high command as white men in their forties with humanities degrees from Oxford, on the grounds that Nick Clegg is a white man in his forties with a humanities degree from Cambridge (Letters, 17 March). The wider question is whether these are men with ‘humanities’ degrees in any received sense of that...