Sir: Your report (19 April) gives details of the large amount of money which might be paid to those wrongly advised to arrange personal pensions. You omitted to mention where the money might come from. The financial services industry is large and com...

Something in the water may also be the answer to the oddity of my graveyard companions. At least, it's the only answer I'm likely to get: none of you managed to offer any explanation whatever in response to my query last week as to why a duck and a d...

Sir: Pensions are only of value if there are people available to provide the goods and services needed by pensioners. This means that as the working/retired ration falls, effectively the value of a pension will fall and this leads to the inevitable c...

This feeling can transfer from one library to another, or from one kind of library to another, but for the real intense passion there is probably only one library at any one time in the life of any individual. For many writers, it would be the London...

Alfie had spent the night vomiting, was delirious and had a temperature of 106F. Dr Archer agreed to turn out reluctantly. When he arrived, he kicked a bowl of Alfie's vomit under the table. When the boy failed to respond to his instructions, Dr Arch...

Sir: I find it strange that in his discussion of what constitutes life Archbishop Habgood dwells so heavily on physical phenomena such as the condition of the brain stem. I have always thought that the spiritual life, of which the archbishop is suppo...

Sir: The immediate and overwhelming response to the Oklahoma City bombing is one of horror and utter condemnation, but is it not also worth considering the hypocritical light which this appalling act of terrorism has cast on President Clinton? "Terro...

Sir: Monday 24 April marks the 80th anniversary of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turkey. It was the first genocide of the 20th century. Talaat Pasha, the Minister of Interior, declared that "those who are innocent toda...

Sir: Bill Rich ("At home with a power-hungry phantom", 20 April) should not despair. About 30 years ago I read in Estates Gazette an account of a consumer in the South-west whose electricity bills rocketed. The electricity board changed the meter, ch...

But science does not stand still. IVF is, by the standards of the Nineties, an "old" technology. The forefront of today's research is manipulating human genes rather than embryos. Instead of transplanting organs, such as kidneys, doctors in Britain a...

Though confusionist historians will point to Shakespeare as an early neophyte ("For mine own part, it was Greek to me", Julius Caesar) most accept that the beat novelist Jack Kerouac first explained (or rather didn't explain) the creed when he wrote:...

Non-Conservatives can be conservative on many points, thoughtfully so and not "unthinkingly", as he would have it. They wish to conserve what is valuable for the many - the health service and social security, an education system open to all and free ...

The trend towards the increasingly rapid application of gene therapies and genetic engineering methods without proper consideration of their impact poses serious risks. The long-term and cumulative effects in any species lead to irreversible and high...

P C Metcalfe Stevenage, Herts

In a profile of me, "The spy in the nation's bedroom", later in the same issue, Mr Cohen states that I have a daughter and that Kelvin MacKenzie never bollocked me when I was working for him at the Sun. Since both these latter assertions are complete...

Wyn Davies Burry Port, Dyfed

Edward Turnbull Gosforth, Northumberland

23 April, 1616: William Shakespeare, widely regarded as the greatest playwright of all time, died on his 52nd birthday. Born in Stratford-upon- Avon, the son of a glover, he wrote at least 36 plays, 154 sonnets and four long poems. He married Anne Ha...

Now, all that has changed. Symbolism was still there but it was entirely different. Far from being the result of some alien infection, the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building represents a disease that sprang from America's own heartland. Th...

Asked about his old friend the painter Derain, Balthus talks of an "extraordinary man ... because he changed his opinions every day like a cloud". You can sense Bowie's antennae quivering. "And did he have a throughline?" he asks. "A sense of continu...

Mr Gummer's department has provided no money to finance or promote the year - the 25th anniversary of a predecessor, which did much to launch the environmental movement despite being quickly and justifiably dubbed European Conversation Year. No natio...

But this is no excuse for the onslaught it led upon their Noble Lordships under the snide heading "Full House puts Lords £6m in pocket", with a sub-heading in only slightly smaller letters declaring "With expenses of up to £134.50 a day, more and mor...