Creative writing

Sir: When Geoffrey Robertson gets it wrong he is calamitous. He ends his Diary note defending ‘a young librarian who in some felonious way misused a computer in order to release the information that the PM’s daughter had been given a scholarship by a Liberal Party donor’.

No Geoffrey, the 21 year old was in fact a creative writing and cultural studies student at the University of Technology, Sydney, and an unqualified casual library assistant. Ah these students, eh? How can he in all honesty not understand using another’s password to access confidential material is a crime? Did students in his day not receive warnings about all kinds of malpractice and piracy, including this?

And did this ‘whistleblowing’ in fact prove the scholarship was awarded for other than high level work? Well no. And Robertson believes the ‘whistle blower’ was unaware she was doing something wrong by forwarding such information to be published? All ok because it was ‘in the public interest? Aha his bias towards the doings of 21 year old students becomes clear when elsewhere he refers to his own 21 year old daughter, a student President at London University. One can only hope lessons have been learned all around in this case.
Vivienne Harrod
Ballina NSW

Silencing students

Sir: The Stepford Students (22 November) are nothing new. The NUS-inspired ‘No Platform’ policy has been used to ban anything that student radicals don’t like since at least the 1970s — usually Christians, pro-life groups or Israel sympathisers.

It should not be in the power of the narrow-minded activists of the student union to prevent individual students or groups from exercising their right to free speech and freedom of association. All students should have equal access to university-funded facilities, regardless of their beliefs. The student union should be seen largely as a social club with no powers to ban anything unless there has been genuinely bad behaviour, at which point it is the role of the university disciplinary committee to step in.
John-Paul Marney
Glasgow

Joan and my father

Sir: I fear Richard Ingrams exaggerates when he claims that ‘no one would have heard of Brendan Behan if it weren’t for Joan Littlewood’ (Letters, 15 November). My father’s talent was already widely acknowledged by the time his play The Hostage was produced at Stratford East.

But I do agree that the description of Joan as ‘thuggish’ is very wide of the mark. She was certainly a tough nut, but one with immense charm. She was actually rather a shy person, whose gruffness could be mistaken for rudeness. When I was a child hanging around backstage at the Theatre Royal, she showed me nothing but kindness, and I remember her fondly.
Blanaid Behan
Witney

The art of wonder

Sir: Harry Mount is right in lamenting ‘the death of serious public culture’ (‘Signs of contempt’, 15 November) whenever he visits a heritage property or exhibition. My recent museum visits with my children convinced me that museums are actually bad for their health. When museums emulate theme parks, with kids’ menus and tacky trinkets, children see them as intrinsically infantile.

I once accompanied a class of Spanish ten-year-olds on a tour of the Joan Miró museum in Barcelona, followed by the city’s Picasso museum. What a light-bulb moment; by first seeing Picasso’s later work and then his conventional early work, the kids understood the subversive power of art and why Picasso was so feared by Franco.

By all means give children grisly details of the ancient Egyptian embalming process or explain how medieval people went to the loo, but be honest with young visitors about what museums are for, so that children keep their sense of wonderment into adulthood. Above all, send kids away with a hunger for more, not just a doughnut and a fridge magnet.
Kathy Walton
Chorleywood, Herts

The mark of equality

Sir: Dr Carl Gray in his recent letter about Mrs Alexander’s hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ has made the classic mistake of misplacing a comma (Letters, 22 November). The infamous line does not read ‘God made them high and lowly’ but instead ‘God made them, high or lowly’. The point of the line is that, whether we are high or lowly, God made us equally. Far from reinforcing the class structure, it stresses our equality before God. We need to reintroduce this line into the hymn books to correct 166 years of misrepresentation.
Nicholas Berry
Cambridge

The Army went in first

Sir: May I correct the assertion that the cricket tour of Pakistan by a team largely made up of elderly white blokes from London, including Roger Alton (Sport, 15 November), was the first to tour the country since the appalling terrorist attack there on the Sri Lankans in 2009. The Army team, made up entirely of youthful soldiers, toured there at the end of 2012. According to the BBC, they received rave reviews and had all their matches broadcast live on national television.
Col J.M.C. Watson (retired)
Welford, Berkshire