18 MAY 1962, Page 11

GENTLENESS This can't go on: is after all injustice of

its kind.

How in what year did this come into fashion? Deliberate indifference to the living, deliberate cultivation of the dead.

Their shoulders slump and they get drunk sometimes and one by one they quit. Orators at the crematorium speak words of gentleness to history.

What was it took his life from Mayakovsky?

What was it put the gun between his fingers?

If with that voice, looking like that, if ever they had offered him in life some crumbs of gentleness.

Men live. Men are trouble-makers.

Gentleness is a posthumous honour.