PJ Murphy wonders if the young men of Eton and Winchester who colluded to cheat in examinations are heading for a career in banking (Letters, 1 September). If history is a guide, I suspect that they are as likely to make their way into politics, where they will find they are equally well prepared and be welcomed by familiar faces who had been taught in the same way.
Alan Brown
York
• Mark Lawson isn’t quite accurate with his assertion (Strike action, Review, 26 August) that Graham Greene is one of a handful of British authors now joined by JK Rowling who have had all their novels adapted for either film or TV. The most significant omission in Greene’s book-to-film canon is his 1961 novel A Burnt Out Case, set in a Congo leper colony. When I was writing Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene more than 30 years ago, he told me: “[Otto] Preminger bought the option twice for that book. Thank God he never made it.”
Quentin Falk
Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire
• Nails and screws were not the only differential when it came to burying the dead in the first world war (Letters, 31 August). The distinguished American surgeon H Cushing, who worked on the western front, recorded in his memoir, From a Surgeon’s Journal, that officers’ coffins were of seasoned wood while unseasoned green elm was deemed appropriate for other ranks.
Kevin Fitzgerald
Norwich
• Re Armageddon: scientists calculate how stars can nudge comets to strike Earth (1 September), nice to see a logarithmic scale of distance from the sun, but should the sun really be a finite circle at 0.1 AU?
Ken Shaw
Wimborne, Dorset
• Just when you think Yotam Ottolenghi is providing recipes with ingredients you recognise (The sweet spot, Weekend, 2 September) it happens again. What on earth is Dutch-processed cocoa powder?
Pauline Wilson
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
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