Thousands of children living in poverty, thousands of families having to access food banks. Two “typical teenagers” with a laptop, iPhone and iPad each, will have trouble spending a day without them (Report, 27 June). Perhaps they could do some voluntary work instead.
Kathy Arundale
Altrincham
• The discomfiture Peter Bradshaw feels (Notebook, 26 June) with Orson Welles’s 1952 Othello might be allayed by consideration of Welles’s 1936 stage production for the Federal Theatre Project of Macbeth using only black American actors.
DBC Reed
Northampton
• A better life, as defined in “Daughters of working mothers do better in life…” (25 June), should not be mistaken for a good life. The Harvard study equates “better” with earning more money and having a managerial position. Using this reductive measurement, our lives are only better if others’ are worse, as we can’t all be managers and earn “4% more than our peers”.
John Linfoot
Bournemouth
• Never mind Pooh, Titty, and lost literary innocence (26 June). What about Mary and the organist Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit? “When she spoke, Tom held his breath, so eagerly he listened; when she sang, he sat like one entranced. She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.”
Mary Jane Drummond
Cambridge
• Titty (“I loved playing Titty”, Letters, 27 June) was surely a shortened form of Letitia, a name that would have been current when Ransome started writing.
Sue Lloyd
Bristol
