Sir: George Huxley (letter, 28 December) got it wrong. It matters not a whit that the preliminary decommissioning of some or all IRA weapons was not, in fact, a precondition set out in the Downing Street Declaration. It matters even less that the dec...

Sir: Your leading article "Even a Pocahontas Christmas is a chance to dream" (23 December) suggests that, for all its hypocrisy, the festival remains a net gain as a social institution. But you had to omit certain negative aspects of the "goodwill" e...

Sir: Your leader "Tartan Terrors of Mr Blair" (27 December) suggests that one way around the "West Lothian" question would be to ignore it as just another of the British constitution's many contradictions. You defend this view by stating that the Eng...

The sour, septuagenarian Senator Robert Dole is overwhelming favourite to become President Clinton's challenger in the autumn. Both Dole and Clinton are fearsome campaigners, but are also notorious for their ability to put one foot in their mouth whi...

Inevitably it will help to bring to a head the fears of the remaining One Nation and pro-European Tories in Mr Major's ranks, who have become increasingly disillusioned at the Conservatives' rightward and anti-European drift. Despite their claims to ...

Well, she has been inconsistent (but so are most of the Cabinet). And she is composed of personal ambition and vanity, alongside public-spiritedness and idealism (they, too.) Both fleeing woman and fled-from party abominate the other as extraordinary...

There is a difference, however. The dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII was essentially a political act: it was by confiscating and selling the assets of the religious orders that the king was able to buy support for his reformation of the c...

Let me dismiss out of hand some of the implausible explanations generated by the Conservative Central Office propaganda machine in the past 48 hours. I can assure readers of the Independent that it has not been out of "ambitious careerism" or "person...

Keith Flett, London N17

Although he is correct in identifying a recent renaissance of interest in the subject, his historical introduction appears to suggest that the topic has been off people's agendas since the early 17th century. On the contrary, there has been a flow of...

Instead of focusing upon recent enlightenment in the treatment of testosterone deficiency (the male equivalent of the well-accepted HRT), you overlay the report with a veneer of scientific respectability by mentioning inconclusive experiments linking...

It is also wrong to link libel cases and their expense with common or garden cases where the cost is less ("Tories back court overhaul to bring down cost of justice", 24 December). As a barrister engaged in less worthy cases than some recent libel ac...

Hardly respectable, but surely something must be going on when even the Independent on Sunday can devote two pages plus a double picture spread to the question of who would inherit the mantle of a dead charlatan. Picardie's attitude to these well-hee...

This is no accident, believe me. What happens between Christmas Eve and 2 January when everyone finally goes back to work? The weather, that's what. Either it's unseasonably warm and the front pages are taken up with pictures of people in summer clot...

Accordingly, with this Picture in my Mind's-eye, I inquired of severall Friends and Acquaintances, in El Vino's publick-house and similar Resorts, whether this annual Performance should now cease; and I am gratified to report that with one Voice, lik...

But when we had wept, we thought about Sir Gordon, and how he and his fellow knights of the round board had poured gold into the soilpipe called "Dividends" instead of into the horn of plenty called"Investment", and how he had amassed so much gold th...

It isn't true that attempts to bring science and religion back together are new. This has been a frequent phenomenon ever since the Renaissance. Nor is it true that science is essentially dualistic. On the contrary, it sees all nature as one. Science...

Old Labour self-destructed because the great pillars that supported it crumbled: on the one hand, the industrial working class and the vehicle of its ambitions, the trade unions; on the other, the curious jumble of Methodism, Marxism, collectivism an...