Simon Skinner

Alan Hollinghurst writes that the epitaph on Ronald Firbank’s gravestone in Rome, ‘Pray for the Soul of Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank Who Entered into Rest on 21st May 1926 Far Away from His Country’, is an odd one, ‘omitting any mention of his age or when he was born, or indeed what his country was’ (LRB, 13 August). I remember being struck by that, too, though...

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, reviewing Kit Kowol’s book Blue Jerusalem, reflects on the Attlee government’s ‘caution and failure to effect truly radical change’ (LRB, 22 May). Elite institutions and authority, he writes, ‘like the enormously increased power of the state, had been fortified by the war’. I don’t think it was solely the inoculating effect of victory....

Ben Walker’s reflections on VAR invite the observation that VAR’s problem is not the technology (which we love to doubt), or the people who operate it (whom we love to demonise), but the relationship between VAR and the on-pitch referee it is supposed to be helping (LRB, 22 February). VAR’s original sin is surely its insistence that the referee remains sovereign. As Walker says,...