The item “Vital Statistics” (Agenda, Business, 21 August, page 39) said shares of housebuilder Persimmon had recovered more than half their value since they fell the day after the vote to leave the EU. This was not wrong, it was ambiguous. By market close on 19 August the shares had recovered more than half of the £7.88 lost between the day before the vote, 23 June (price £20.98), and the day after (£13.10). But to recover more than half the 24 June price of £13.10 the shares need to get to £19.66 or better. On 19 August the price was £17.48. On 23 August, after Persimmon announced better than expected half-year results, the price was £18.70. At Friday’s close it was £18.83.
“Czech assassins of Holocaust chief ‘deserve a heroes’ burial’” (News, 21 August, page 25) did not intend to convey an impression that the two men who gave their lives in killing the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 had not been memorialised at all in Prague, but, rather, that their role as national heroes had been deliberately downplayed by communist authorities. Ján Kubiš and Josef Gabcík were honoured after the Second World War in a memorial on a wall of the St Cyril and Methodius Orthodox church where they died. The article’s focus was the current campaign to have their remains exhumed from Ďáblice cemetery, where they are believed to lie with thousands of victims of Nazism and communism. Campaigners seek their proper burial and the cemetery to be declared a national memorial.
Write to Stephen Pritchard, Readers’ Editor, the Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, email observer.readers@observer.co.uk tel 020 3353 4656
