I am as appalled as the other artists and arts lovers and activists who have expressed their concern about the philistine taboo on arts and creative subjects in the new English baccalaureate for secondary school children (Letters, 10 May). As William Blake pointed out, “Nations are destroy’d or flourish, in proportion as their Poetry, Painting, and Music are destroy’d or flourish.”
Michael Horovitz
London
• The arts and propaganda have been neatly conjoined. During the height of American Abstract Expressionism its exhibitions were funded for about 20 years by the CIA as evidence of the US’s freedom of expression compared with the tightly constricted social realism of the USSR. Ironic that many of the artists whose work was supported were ex-communists and would have been denounced in the McCarthy era.
David Cockayne
Lymm, Cheshire
• The Grenfell Tower inquiry panel is now to be widened in a response to concerns over Moore-Bick’s ability to relate to the survivors (Opinion, 11 May). Weren’t identical concerns expressed about William Macpherson when he was appointed to lead the Stephen Lawrence inquiry?
Michael Woodgate
Bristol
• If Professor Pääbo and his Leipzig team (Report, 12 May) want to know what differentiated the brains of Homo sapiens from our extinct Neanderthal cousins they might do worse than read William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955), described by Arthur Koestler as “an earthquake in the petrified forests of the English novel”. We, of course, are The Inheritors.
Richard Gravil
Penrith, Cumbria
• While writing “grandmother” I got to “gra” and autocorrect suggested “Grauniad” (Letters, 11 May).
Kenneth Atkin
Richmond, Surrey
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