Dr Leach's New Jerusalem
LETTERS
From Dr Edmund R. Leach, Mrs Joan Delderfield, Mrs Marjorie Sisson, George F. Mathew, Robin Wright, the Rev Wynne Jones, Christopher Sykes, D. P. Choyce, FRCS, K. W. Meiklejohn, E. K. Lumley, Marjorie Jones.
Sir: It is surely unwise for professional politicians whose expertise consists in the inexact use of language to accuse their more academic colleagues of just this kind of offence (Personal column, 15 December). That someone of Mr Angus Maude's political complexion should dislike what I have to say is hardly surprising but l must confess that I find it quite gratuitously insulting that he should suggest that I do not understand my own language: 'Clearly Dr Leach has not the remotest idea of the meaning of the word "tawdry" . . ' Have I . not indeed? If Mr Maude will do me the courtesy . of consulting the OED he will find that the learned authors have given the melodramatic Miss Braddon (author of the bestselling novel Lady Audley, 1862) immortality for the following sentence : 'An aspect of genteel desolation and tawdry misery not easily to be paralleled in wretchedness.' That very precisely is the sense in which I referred to 'tawdry secrets' of the isolated nuclear famify in con- temporary Britain.
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