The return of the Stone of Scone, Scotland's historic symbol of sovereignty, 700 years after it was plundered by King Edward I highlights the auctioning of Scotland's history. Over the years, trunkloads of treasures and objects of historical value have been stolen or sold to the highest bidder.

The very rich are, of course, too worried about their silhouettes to eat at all; so are modern stars of stage and screen (in the old days, the Charles Laughtons and Edward G Robinsons, not to speak of innumerable Hungarians, carried weight as though to prove a point). It seems to me today that it is the middling rich who do all the eating, and it gripes me that they are the very people who seldom, if ever, actually pay for a meal.

...but is the effort, and are the pesticides, really necessary? Anna Pavord extolls the virtues of the alternative, Freedom Lawn

Hugh Matheson talks to Todd Kristol, who will steer Oxford in the Boat Race

INVESTMENT COLUMN

A new biography of WH Auden promises to reveal the inner man, not the gay cruiser. It fails. By James Fenton

THE INVESTMENT COLUMN

Nigel Smith investigates the academic jet-setters of the 18th century

Crowds come to Dungeness Beach to admire Derek Jarman's garden. But few visitors notice the work of his neighbour, Brian Yale, who has created a bizarre sculpture garden using materials washed up on the beach. Jonathan Glancey, however, found the plot. Photographs by Andrew Yale

Herman Wardwell ("Fritz") Liebert was a distinctive personality in Johnson and Boswell studies, but will be remembered even more as the first librarian of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. He was responsible for the development of its collections from a firm base in Yale's historic library, but even more he provided the buoyant link between the Beinecke brothers who funded the marvellous new building and the traditions of Yale bibliophily which it enshrined and developed.

Doctor Foster

What a fine day, missus

A SMALL news item tells us (Briefly, 29 January) that Yale University has shredded the "posture" photographs of former students made by WH Sheldon, on the grounds that they "advanced a since-discredited science". Sheldon thought it would be possible to measure human physique on certain basic dimensions, and relate these to personality characteristics. It was a scientific hypothesis which was in the end not supported. Are we to destroy the evidence for every theory that is no longer accepted? Do we shred Euclid's work because we have non-Euclidean geometry, or that of Newton because we have Einstein?

From Professor Richard Beacham Sir: Your article detailing the curious practice some years back of routinely preparing nude photographs of students at many of America's elite universities ("Even the wife of the President of the United States sometimes had to stand naked", 21 January) reminded this former Yalie (Class of 1968) that he, too, had experienced this during his "bright college years".