A nice letter
Sir: Do you never receive coin- pliMentary letters? Does no one feel it proper to put pen to paper except in indignation, argument or disapprobation? Or is it simply that commendatory letters are modestly not published? I seek in vain among this week's Letters for the praises I thought certain would be forthcoming from readers for your magnanimity of the week before in publishing such a splendidly forthright statement of the Labour view as that from Mr John Grant, rap; for your cheerful broadmindedness in allowing Mr Andrew Lumsden to ventilate the grievances of homosexuals in your notably un-queer columns; and for Mr Kenneth Hurren's excoriatingly satirical prognostications for 1971, which manage to pinpoint succinct- ly, amusingly and penetratingly, but with no overt display of egotistical spleen, just about everything that is presently wrong with the theatre. As a conservative, heterosexual theatregoer, I offer my small thanks and congratulations.
And while I'm about it, cheers for the exemplary quality and readability of your Arts section in general and Mr Hurren, Mr. Milnes and Miss Widdicombe in particular. The eccentric and reac- tionary views on the Arts which you, Sir, propound in your Notebook do not, it is pleasing to note, preclude your employment of the best team of reviewers in the business—in contrast, it is less pleasing to note, to your book reviewers who, with the exception of the blissfully dotty Mr Auberon Waugh, must surely be the dullest, most pedestrian lot of literary gentlemen in all the land. (Perhaps that will get this into print!)
J. Armitage Campden Hill Gate, Duchess of Bedford's Walk, w8
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