LETTERS

Spectator, The, Jan 17, 2004

Tony and the Aztecs

From Sebastian Shakespeare

Sir: Theodore Dalrymple notes that Jacques Chirac wrote an introduction to a catalogue of Ecuadorean baroque religious sculpture ('Escape from barbarity', 3 January) and wonders if Mr Blair would dare do such a thing. He has. In November 2002 Tony Blair wrote a commendation in the catalogue for the Royal Academy's Aztec art exhibition. 'The era of the Aztecs represents one of the great historic milestones in human history,' wrote the Prime Minister, 'contributing richly to the modern world we know today. The first European encounter with this civilisation can only have been one of awe.' Phoney cultivation or militant philistinism? As every skuleboy no, an appreciation of art was hardly an overriding concern of Cortes, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico.

Sebastian Shakespeare

London W8

From Professor Robin Jacoby

Sir: Theodore Dalrymple's emigration to France smacks of Daniel going blindfold into the lions' den. The social and moral degeneration he so accurately describes in Britain is no less, as he virtually admits, on the other side of the Channel. Furthermore, there is a revolutionary tradition there which makes the prospect of violent unrest from the underclass more likely.

Robin Jacoby

Department of Psychiatry,

University of Oxford

Oy Vay!

From Philip Hensher

Sir: Benedict le Vay is surely being rather hard on Lynne Truss's English ('Pluck Truss and grieve', 10 January), and the examples he chooses of her bad English are debatable at best. 'Anticipate' long since stopped being restricted to the meaning 'take action before an expected action', if indeed it ever did mean only that. There is surely nothing much wrong with the structure 'before doing X, first let us'. Another objection is much stranger: there are things in English called phrasal verbs, and one of them is 'add in', clearly distinct from 'add' and 'add up', perfectly idiomatic and correct. A famous piece of mockpedantry turns up with Mr le Vay's contention that you should not write 'the group thankfully folded within 18 months'; if that is wrong, then surely so is 'the house sadly burnt down last year'. And for heaven's sake, can we really accept that Miss Truss and every other native user of English demonstrates incompetence by the use of the phrase 'I wonder why?' I don't agree with all Miss Truss's prescriptions about punctuation, and would not claim to be an infallible user of English myself, but anyone can see that she writes vividly, freshly and correctly. The same could not be said about Mr le Vay, with his wild talk about alarm bells ringing on redundant desks, creeps who can simultaneously fawn and spring up, frigates, bulkheads, shrouds, magazines, toys, prams and all.

Philip Hensher

London SW8

From Dr Madsen Pirie

Sir: Lynne Truss has done grammar a great service by helping people to use it properly in a living, changing language.

Benedict le Vay is wrong in every example he cites of the alleged grammatical errors of Lynne Truss. She communicates successfully and clearly with her use of 'anticipated', 'all' (of a given list), 'first', and 'thankfully'. Le Vay's use would make him misunderstood, especially with thankfully, which has not been used his way for a generation. Truss also correctly uses question marks to denote puzzlement as well as questions.

It could be that he is simply unlucky in happening to be wrong on each attempted criticism, but such consistent error implies an incorrect paradigm. It could be that, while Lynne Truss is writing about a language in which people communicate, Benedict le Vay concerns himself with something that exists in the pages of books gathering dust on library shelves.

Most of us know the rules which a supercilious pedant might cite in an attempt to belittle people. We also know when they were superseded by different rules, and why they changed.

Madsen Pirie

London SW1

Regime of repression

From Oleg Gordievsky

Sir: The discovery I have made in Britain is that many academics wear pink glasses. Paul Robinson claims, 'The government of Vladimir Putin is probably the most benign in Russian history.' ('Putin's might is White', 10 January). He concludes by stating that his activities are 'the best hope of liberal democracy in Russia'. It sounds good, but it doesn't correspond with the truth. In the four years of tenure, Putin liquidated independent television channels and most of the opposition newspapers. Thus the government has a total freedom for propaganda and indoctrination. The brightest and the most successful entrepreneurs (Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky, Berezovsky) have been imprisoned or expelled from Russia. He put into the administration predominantly KGB people and army generals. The influence of the KGB is growing steadily, but there is no Central Committee of the CPSU to control it. Instead there is Vladimir Putin, himself a KGB lieutenant-colonel.

In all those four years Putin waged a brutal war against the nation of Chechnya. He is using the airforce, gun helicopters, artillery, vacuum bombs, concentration camps, illegal arrests, torture and the execution of Chechen men. The capital, Grozny, looks like Stalingrad in 1943.