6 DECEMBER 2003, Page 42

Victimhood's chronicler

From Sir Peregrine Worsthorne Sir: In rebuttal of my complaint that Martha Gellhorn was unsympathetic to the victims of Soviet tyranny, John Hatt (Letters, 29 November) cites her writing an article critical of Soviet tyranny 'as early [my italics] as 1972'. Surely that date says it all. For it was as early as the mid-1930s, in the Spanish Civil War, that Martha Gellhorn began to wax very eloquent about the victims of fascism.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire