Martin Shaw (Letters, 28 January) equates the Palestinian Nakba with genocide. Painful though it was, and proper that it should be acknowledged, it is not legitimate to classify it alongside the Holocaust or more recent mass slaughters of ethnic groups.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords
• I am afraid the idea that “those encouraging the use of Latinised plurals” should have “their recta kicked” (Letters, 28 January) has a fundamental error. The rectum (from rectum intestinum, “straight intestine”) is an internal organ and thus not directly kickable. Presumably your correspondent meant culi (buttocks).
Bruce Holman
Waterlooville, Hampshire
• Oh, how I miss Simon Hoggart and his column. How can I now tell readers that I bought bath towels from Tesco because the label describes them as being “reversible” and “dual function”? I’ve never had towels like that before.
Peter Quinn
Helperby, North Yorkshire
• Ms Henley (Letters, 29 January) had it easy. When I was a young librarian in 1972 I had to share a room with a stranger, and the other person in the flat (and her friends) had to walk through our small room to get to the bath and lavatory (there was no basin so we cleaned our teeth in the bath). And the man in the room above had an active and noisy sex life, unlike us.
Philippa Dolphin
London
• In 1963 I realised two of my three German A-level exams would occur on the first day of my regular but agonising period (Letters, 29 January). When I asked my GP for the pill, to alter the day it started, he said: “No. I only prescribe it for a bridegroom’s convenience – where the wedding date turns out to coincide.” I failed that time - but got the required A when I retook it the following year.
Glenys Canham
London
• Daffs in Notts (Letters, 28 January)? There was one flowering at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire, around 20 December. But it felt like gazumping the festive season to say so at the time.
Mark Lewinski
Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire
