26 JULY 2008, page 24

Sensible Scares

Sir: To be fair to the scaremongers (Another Voice, 19 July), at least some of the scares mentioned by Matthew Parris (al-Qa’eda, HIV) seem less frightening in retrospect not......

Saint Pius Xii?

Sir: Pope Pius XII was described by Golda Meir, the then Israeli foreign minister, as ‘a true friend of the Jewish people’ at the time of the Pontiff’s death in 1958. His......

An Intrusive ‘g’

Sir: Toby Young (Status Anxiety, July 12) tells us that ‘Joseph Epstein, a retired academic’ coined the word ‘Kindergarchy’. The pedant academic in me considers that the......

Demonising Paedophiles

Sir: Charlotte Metcalf hopes the convicted paedophile Roger Took (‘The Devil in our midst’, 12 July) will read her words ‘with par ticular care’. I wonder how she would wish......

Inaccessible Material

Sir: Charles Leadbeater (‘The web is a conservative force’, 12 July) may be right that the internet enables us to record for posterity more of the ephemera of our daily lives......

The Pastrymaker’s Revenge

Sir: Charles Moore notes (The Spectator’s Notes, 19 July) that croissants were invented to celebrate Jan Sobieski’s defeat of the Turks outside the walls of Vienna in 1683. In......