2 APRIL 1994, Page 31

Knight errant

In Tom Shone's review of Tony Curtis: the Autobiography (Books, 5 March) he refers to 'his lousy Roman accent in Son of Ali Baba: "Yondah lies the castle of my Fad- dah." ' The much pilloried remark was actually uttered by Curtis, as a dispossessed English knight, in The Black Shield of Fal- worth (1954). Apart from the fact that in Son of Ali Baba he was not a Roman but a soldier of the Caliph, what does a (presum- ably ancient) Roman accent sound like anyway?

John Dean

7 The Bowling Green, Edinburgh