The UK’s position in the Eurovision song contest show us very clearly how much other European countries love us (Are you listening, Putin, 14 May). They don’t. We’ve been making disparaging comments about Europe and the EU for too long. If the Eurovision results are “political”, consider the real political arena. Anybody who says we’ll get favourable trading terms with the EU, should we be so stupid as to leave, is living in cloud cuckoo land. The remaining 27 will want revenge.
Duncan Anderson
Immingham, Lincolnshire
• After Saturday’s Eurovision song contest performances, should we also have a referendum on whether to remain in the contest on the 23 June?
Paresh Motla
Thame, Oxfordshire
• Natalie Nougayrède (Asia has yet to confront its past – be grateful Europe did, 14 May) claims that, unlike in China and Japan, “in Europe the lessons of history have been spelled out and learned”. Could she spell out how western European nations have acknowledged the lessons of their violent annexation and systematic exploitation of the non-western world, on the back of which so much contemporary European prosperity rests?
Dr Miles Larmer
Associate professor of African history, University of Oxford
• Plenty of Venetians and Neapolitans would dispute your reporter’s description of Milan’s La Scala as the birthplace of opera (Report, 12 May). Naples’ Teatro di San Carlo opened in 1737, 41 years before La Scala, and remains one of Italy’s major opera houses; opera was already flourishing in Venice in the 1600s; and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, the earliest opera still regularly performed, had its premiere in Mantua in 1607.
Derek Robinson
Matlock, Derbyshire
• The truthless pursuit of power (Post-truth politicians no joke, Opinion, 14 May)?
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
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