Your editorial on public sector pay (Nurses teachers and firefighters are long overdue a rise, 20 June) was disappointing for a couple of reasons. First, you exclude police officers from the headline, when they have suffered similar pay freezes and cuts, compounded by pay-scale freezes and the largest raid on pensions. Second, you use the sexist term “policemen” when referring to officers running into danger – are you suggesting policewomen run the other way? The perfectly respectable gender-neutral alternatives “officer” and “constable” have been in satisfactory use for many decades.
DCI Louise Fleckney
Broughton, Northamptonshire
• James Bond in From Russia with Love, to his enemy Donald “Red” Grant: “Red wine with fish. Well, that should have told me something.” Sepp Blatter, lunching with David Conn (G2, 19 June), ordered white wine with côte de bœuf. Doesn’t that tell us something?
Clifton Melvin
Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire
• When the Victorian reforming press was on the way out, it too went tabloid (Letters, 19 June), as the historian Malcolm Chase explains: “There was no surer sign of irretrievable decline than when, in 1852, the Star of Freedom assumed what we would now call a ‘tabloid’ format.” Don’t do it! It will mean the end of the real Guardian.
Robert Poole
Sale, Greater Manchester
• Bob Dylan is indeed in a long and mostly honourable tradition of creative borrowing (Letters, 19 & 20 June). In his Essays in the Art of Writing, Robert Louis Stevenson observed that “stolen waters are proverbially sweet”. His Treasure Island parrot may have been borrowed from Robinson Crusoe, the skeleton from Poe and the stockade from Masterman Ready. Stevenson cared “not a jot”, averring that no man had a monopoly of skeletons or talking birds. These useful writers, he believed, had left behind them “footprints on the sands of time”.
Ian Watson
Glasgow
• From Dylan himself: “Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king.”
Billy Morrison
Ayr, Ayrshire
• Given recent events, it is interesting to note that in the City of London, Trump Street leads straight into Russia Row.
Anthony Marsh
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire
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