Bassett hounded
Sir: Mr Zametica (Letters, 5 November) hauls me, somewhat laboriously, over the coals for my assertion that the mob in Serbia is 'particularly disagreeable'.
Quite how someone living in Cambridge imagines he knows more about a Serbian mob than an eyewitness of a not in Titograd defeats me. In the last six months I have witnessed demonstrations in Pra- gue, Budapest, Gdansk and Ljubljana. None could rival the crudeness and violent sentiments of those seen in Serbia.
In John Buchan's novels — which I'm sure Mr Zametica would assert are, along with Anthony Hope and possibly Dornford Yates, the only books we 'British amateurs' ever read — there frequently Occurs the figure of the querulous intellec- tual. Though a stranger to exhaustion, honourable and dishonourable alike, he is something of an armchair politician. He has, so Buchan relates, 'the feeble violence of a demented sheep' and enjoys an education which sadly 'did not include that valuable art, an appreciation of the flip- pant'.
But he can, I must confess, provide amusement, and Mr Zametica's letter ab- out 'Balkan Bassettisms', distracting us as it did this morning from our habitual plotting of the restoration of the Habsburg empire over the kedgeree, provoked much laughter which could be heard all the way down the coast in Fiume.
Richard Bassett
Miramar, Trieste
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