Geoffrey Wheatcroft

SIR: ‘Britain’s problems, Heath declared in the autumn of 1973, were the problems of success’ (Paul Addison in his review of The Writing on the Wall by Phillip Whitehead – LRB, 23 January). But he did not. I’m not sure how this misattribution has entered educated folklore, along with Voltaire supposedly saying that he disagreed with what you said but … or Goering’s appropriation of the...

SIR: Many of your readers will have smiled at Mr Clive James’s honeyed tribute to the London Review of Books, and also to the late New Review (LRB, 7 November 1985). It was brave of him to write it and brave of you to publish it. The smile was wiped off my own face, however, by the sentence: ‘Grub Street journeymen who could point to no artistic achievement beyond a noseful of burst veins were...