Years back, when my uncle died, a crematorium cassette cock-up gave us Champagne Charlie as a finale instead of Götterdämmerung (Letters, 28 June). Bernard Levin wrote about it in the Times, whose cartoon had a champagne bottle with a skull for a cork. In the Sun, my uncle’s photo shared page 3 with that day’s topless model. A truly unforgettable sendoff.
Karen Barratt
Winchester
• The last song at my funeral will be Ivor Cutler’s I’m Going in a Field, which I will be.
John Beresford
Cambridge
• Charlotte Higgins paints a vivid picture of a young man holding his breath in concentration, steadying the amphora and, as the metal tip of his stylus meets the half-baked clay, writing a line from the Aeneid with his right hand (Why a piece of ancient pot and a scrap of Virgil’s poetry speak to us down the ages, 24 June). Might one suggest that the work could have been done by a left-handed woman?
Rosalind Clayton
London
• The decline in arts and language courses in schools (Report, 29 June) would have been regretted by the headmaster of my father’s school, St Francis Xavier’s in Liverpool, who once said: “In the event of a fire, make sure those boys studying Greek get out of the building first.”
Stephen Percy
Easton, Hampshire
• You say Gustav Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer has become, at £85.3m, the “most valuable” work of art sold at auction in Europe (Report, 27 June). It’s a nice painting, but I prefer the word “costly” to “valuable”. All in the eye of the beholder.
Nick Bennett-Britton
Shawford, Hampshire
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