Nicolas Walter

Eric Korn’s review of the second volume of Adrian Desmond’s biography of T.H. Huxley (LRB, 24 April), noting that Huxley ‘constructed a respectable, almost a pious agnosticism’, misleadingly states that he did this ‘while distancing himself from the political atheists Bradlaugh, Watts, Holyoake’, and even more misleadingly adds that ‘when the Agnostic Annual pirated a piece of his, Huxley...

John Lanchester accepts Robert Burchfield’s claim in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage about the double pronunciation of the word the (LRB, 2 January); but it is surely as false as many of his other claims, which do so much damage to the rest of the book, as they previously did to the Oxford English Dictionary. It is true that the is pronounced thuh (neutral schwa) before words beginning with...

Philip French’s memoir of Jeremy Wolfenden stirs other memories, some confirming but others contradicting his version, as Rex Winsbury shows (Letters, 20 June). French speaks as one of the stars alongside Wolfenden in the Oxford firmament forty years ago; but things looked different to those who were closer to the ground, who had neither sought nor received commissions during National Service, who...

Thomas Laqueur’s review of The Facts of Life (LRB, 22 February) regrets that Roy Porter and Lesley Hall didn’t include in their survey of sexual literature ‘Richard and Jane Carlile and their Everywoman’s Book’, and adds a summary of the contribution of ‘the Carliles’ to the birth-control movement. He is right to point out the omission, but wrong about what was omitted. For one thing,...

John Simpson complains that the attempt ‘to topple the established authorities’ can be disastrous if it endangers valuable work and that ‘the sporadic undermining of a valuable record is dangerous’ (Letters, 24 August). But the attempt to prop up a national institution such as the OED also has dangers, since the defence is itself open to obvious attack. In my own experience, the OED is far...