CP Snow’s essay on The Two Cultures (Editorial, 21 November) was published in the New Statesman on 6 October 1956 – also the day of Bobby Charlton’s Manchester United debut and my wife Lucy’s birth. For what it’s worth, I’m unrepentantly on the FR Leavis side of the debate: science can learn far more from the humanities than the other way round.
David Kynaston
London
• During the 1960s coypu eradication campaign in the Norfolk Broads, my mother regularly served a tasty coypu stew, including, on one occasion, to newspaper and BBC journalists (Waiter, there’s a rat in my burger: rodent on the menu in Moscow, 19 November). We children were under strict instructions to say, if asked, that it was rabbit.
Mary Stiff
Broadclyst, Devon
• The French have been eating nutria (coypu) for years. On the Île d’Oléron you can buy jars of very tasty rillettes de ragondin, made from local nutria – and just down the road you can, for a modest fee, visit Le Parc Myocastor, where you can stroke and feed tame specimens of the same species.
Andrew Wright
Solihull, West Midlands
• Nice to see some column inches devoted to women’s rugby alongside the previews of the men’s autumn Tests in Saturday’s Sport supplement. But no preview of Scotland’s match with Argentina. Aren’t we still part of the union?
Graeme Forbes
Edinburgh
• The proposal that a future female US president might be chosen at birth and educated into the role (Letters, 18 November) is intriguing. However, this has been tried already. Our current monarch is the beneficiary of such a system.
Jonathan Cooper
Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
• Have those who thought up the notion of “Jam” (just about managing) never heard of the White Queen’s dictum: “Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today” (Passnotes, G2, 21 November)?
Polly Morris
Ilfracombe, Devon
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