Hugh Pennington

Edmund Gordon mentions the proposal made by the conservation group Buglife that insect-friendly corridors be set up across the UK to prevent an insect apocalypse (LRB, 12 May). The most successful precedent for this was the trenches on the Western Front in the First World War. The insect was the louse, which spread trench fever. It saved many lives because the disease made soldiers (including A.A....

There is a lot of truth in John Sturrock’s warning about the tyranny of medical nomenclature (LRB, 7 October). The controversial psychiatrist William Sargeant used to get round it by teaching that you diagnosed someone as depressed, whatever their symptoms, if they got better when given anti-depressant drugs. But F.G. Crookshank, who Sturrock quotes with approval for attacking the notion that diseases...

The particular culpability of the processors and vendors of the cattle feed that spread BSE through the British herd and probably sent it elsewhere is raised trenchantly by Elizabeth Young (Letters, 4 January). Although the Phillips Report does not give complete absolution, stating that ‘we … censure (although we do not have the means to identify) those in the feed industry who deliberately breached...