Biting Taki's Bait

Sir: My fellow Englishmen will, I hope, for- give me for rising to Taki's bait (High life, 25 May), but just once in a while I feel it is necessary to reply to the jibes and......

Bombastic Beethoven

Sir: In his interesting article on Beethoven's dethronement as a cultural icon (Arts, 18 May), Michael Kennedy suggests that the phenomenon is fairly recent, dating back perhaps......

Cutting Criticism

Sir: I hope that Tony Blair's 'honing in on the salad' in Anne McElvoy's article 'I danced with a man' (25 May) was a typo- graphical error — but one can't be sure. This curious......

Hare-coursing

Sir: I am never entirely sure of the ethics involved in having your contributors use you as a kind of poste restante, but David Hare's characteristically superbly written Diary......

Penny Telegraph

Sir: Stephen Glover (Media studies, 25 May) castigated the Times propaganda for claiming that paper had 'almost doubled its circulation in three years' without making any......

Tail End

Sir: It was with a mixture of dismay, disbe- lief and amusement that I read that Rory Knight Bruce ('It's a dog's law', 25 May) turned to the Kennel Owners' Association for......

Sad, Drunk And Balletic

Sir: Richard Beeston (Letters, 18 May) has missed the point of Robin Gedye's nice piece about expelled correspondents. The Soviet culling of 1985 fractured many lives —......