Sir: I am one of the Shell workers called upon by Anita Roddick in Another View (28 November) to search their consciences. From where does her sense of moral superiority come? I strive to be a caring citizen in common with most people on this planet,...

Who is right? Education has done pretty well in the Budget, considerably better than other areas of spending. But Mr Clarke has used smoke and mirrors to obscure what is really going on. The overall grant to local authorities is only going up in line...

Sir: Your bold menu of "The 10 best ideas of the decade" (Second Section, 29 November) claims to have moved on from the economics-driven nostrums of the Eighties. But the patrons of your more pluralist cafeteria could nevertheless remain dissatisfied...

A much bigger issue is whether we can explain that warming; in particular, can we attribute any part of it to human activity? Traditionally, many climate scientists have hedged their bets, using the double negative that warming is "not inconsistent" ...

Sir: After reading Mike Everett's open letter "Dear pigeon fanciers" (Section Two, 28 November), I am reminded of several occasions when I have seen distressed racing pigeons. In very hot weather on a canal boating holiday we saw at least two lying o...

Both events yet again raise the difficult matter of how best to protect our children from exposure to "unsuitable" material. In the teen mag row, the prohibitionists lined up to call for a ban on the magazine in question, pinning their faith on the p...

Sir: Following the Rosemary West trial, the subject of "missing persons" has again become a topic of interest and discussion ("Lost and not found", 28 November). There is very proper sympathy with those families from whom someone has recently left ho...

Here is the second half of the check-list. Good luck! Just remember every evening to check if anything on the list has happened today. They don't have to happen in this order, any order will do. Good luck! q You are in town one day when an ambulance ...

Karpov was then able to dominate the chess world for a decade, and Kasparov for the decade after him. From 1975 until 1995, they were the only two great players around. However, there is nothing like a fading champion to encourage a new generation, a...

Sir: Andrew Marr ascribes the conflict in Northern Ireland to "the long decades of Protestant ascendancy, bigotry and discrimination". He does not seem to have noticed that it was only last week that the Irish Republic voted, by the narrowest of marg...

Sir: "Revealed: the 40 most influential gay men in Britain" (Section Two, 27 November) was neither revealing nor can the selection be taken seriously. Nearly all of the men concerned were already well known to be gay, so what has been revealed? Some ...

Well it's all far from being as simple as it might seem. Suppose, for example, that Eve married two different chaps, Shem and Ham, say, and had one child from each liaison. And suppose that Shem and Ham were both sons of a chap called Noah, but with ...

Sir: If it were not for the fact that (as proved by your survey) sexual inclination is generally irrelevant to one's professional life, I would say that I was looking forward to your "survey of lesbians influential in Britain today" - which, I trust,...

Sir: Whatever the statistics may be concerning litigation in civil courts (letters, 27 November), the fact is that claims against local authorities have risen dramatically in the past 10 years, as Polly Toynbee correctly reported (24 November). Yours...

The first question was, who were the other 23 selected "prominent women"? Some had no trouble earning the sobriquet - Lady Blackstone, the Labour baroness without whom no conference or committee is ever complete; Gillian Shephard, the most senior wom...

It's one of those things that was probably invented somewhere snowy, like Germany or Sweden, where you open one window excitedly every day before Christmas and there's a picture of a robin inside, and you say to your crestfallen children, "Well, perh...

Sir: The judgment by the Court of Appeal in the Guinness fraud trial (Law Report; "Guinness defendants' appeals dismissed", 28 November) will no doubt bring a sigh of relief from the newly created Environment Agency and the green lobby. The relief ma...

There was no way that John Major and the Irish premier, John Bruton, could reasonably explain to the US President why, after 15 months of peace, all-party talks had not yet begun. And Britain, ever anxious to emphasise its sovereignty over Northern I...