Let’s turn off Boris’s oxygen of publicity (Front page, 22 February) and feed him hydrogen instead, in the hope he’d inflate and float off.
Anna Ford
London
• Reader Peter Hughes’s description of scattering cabinet “monkeys” (Letters, 22 February) reminds me of another simian truth: “The higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more of its arse you can see”. In respect of the current cabinet’s EU referendum machinations, I for one have seen enough.
Len Newton
Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire
• Isn’t it time we took over “old” and “elderly”? (Less of the elderly hillwalkers please, Letters, 19 February). Look what good people did with “gay” and “queer”. “Be bold, be old” could be just as good as “We’re queer, we’re here”. Can’t think what to do with “elderly”, though.
Philip Simpson (78 years old)
London
• The release of official papers revealing Margaret Thatcher’s apparent interference in the Westland affair (Thatcher urged to sack Heseltine over Westland crisis, secret papers reveal, 19 February) and her ambivalent attitude to apartheid (PM ignored Howe’s plea to help troubled games in 1986, 19 February) come as no surprise to those who recall these events, but they do provide us with the satisfaction that we were probably right about her all along.
Christopher Price
Gillingham, Kent
• Philip Stogdon is almost correct about the omitted apostrophe in Finnegans Wake (Letters, 20 February). The title is not an exhortation, however, ordering Finnegans to wake up – in that case “Finnegans” would be vocative and would be followed by a comma. It is rather a statement, ie Finnegans do wake, in a perpetual cycle of rebirth, reincarnation and, as the Blooms would have it, metempsychosis. Joyce wasn’t one for orders, giving or taking.
Liam Whelan
Cork
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