Bernard Porter

I’ll leave the truth of the Bumbireh episode to others to determine. All I want to add is that both Tim Jeal and Paul Landau are mistaken in inferring that I was persuaded by the former’s defence of Stanley. Rereading the original article, I think it’s plain that I was generally sceptical of Jeal’s approach.

Bernard Porter writes: I’m happy to defer to David Elstein on the question of numbers. I too was unconvinced by Elkins’s, but didn’t have the resources at hand to check them. I thought that stating the 100,000 figure as a ‘claim’ of Elkins’s would let me off the hook. Obviously not. Otherwise I think I’ve represented both books accurately, apart from the slip confusing ‘the hands of...

Bernard Porter writes: It may surprise Danny Karlin to learn that I agree with most of his letter, except of course its tone. I was careless about the boarding house in Southsea, which wasn’t strictly a ‘school’. On everything else I’m sure we could find common ground. I agree about the impact of the cruelty Kipling was subjected to at Southsea. ‘Goggle-eyed’, like ‘runtish’, was intended...

Richard Boston (Letters, 21 February) must have misunderstood what I wrote about Churchill. I suggested that he would have preferred the Nobel Peace Prize to the Literature Prize he was awarded in 1953. I also asked whether the admiration for Sweden’s ‘warriors’ he expressed in his letter to the Swedish Nobel Committee (apologising for not being able to collect the Literature Prize personally)...