Sir: Colonel Skinner (November 18) is not alone in finding offence at Mr Waugh's reviews.
Mr Waugh seems incapable of reviewing a book, except at rare intervals, without making overt reference to its sexual passages, commenting thereon in his own particular way and indulging in what I think to be the grossest impropriety in his selection of words. Mr Waugh, and some of the authors whom he reads, presumably for his profit and possibly for his pleasure, ought by now to have emerged from the Lower Fourth and grown up a little. I would like to think that he himself does not use these ' nefandous ' words, nor discuss the matters he so freely does in print, 'in his daily social intercourse, whether in the refreshment rooms at Paddington station or in the bars of provincial hotels, whose subtle distinction from those of London hotels escapes me.
Some years ago I chucked up The Spectator about a year after Mr Waugh took over from Mr Alan Watkins — indeed a sad change. In his political commentaries Mr Waugh was then not offensive, he was just plain dull. Now. he is certainly not dull, he is just plain offensive, at least to me.
I am therefore, with some regret because of the good things I shall miss, once again' chucking up The Spectator, and shall not renew my reading until you, Sir, use your authority properly and produce a journal which is fit for all eyes to see. My so doing will hardly shake the foundations of Gower Street but if all your readers who agree with Colonel Skinner were to stop taking The Spectator for twelve months you would no doubt have 'to consider very carefully your policy in the matter of printing scurrilities.
We all might benefit by reading and reflecting on the letter of St Paul to the Ephesians (ch. 5 v. 3 if), but Christian teaching is not very popular nowadays.
M. R. Quartley Cranfield, Summerhill Road, Lansdown, Bath
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