Nicolas Walter, London N1 l ONE OF the photographs in "The Lost London of Cartier Bresson" (Review, 2 July), showed passengers buying tickets at Piccadilly tube station in 1951. The fares displayed on the ticket machines reveal that the cost of trave...

The manipulation of history by convenient omissions allows minority groups to be stigmatised and controlled. Paul Buckley Canterbury, Kent

TORY MPs who took part in last week's ritual were described by several journalists as the most sophisticated electorate in the world - a notion which, as Alan Watkins pointed out last Sunday, was hard to take seriously, given your average backbencher...

Keith Flett London N17

n YOU, with me, will have noticed the Prime Minister's tie on Tuesday. What a knot! A knot of remarkable, awesome proportion. What did it mean? Had he bought a tie that was too big for him, or was there something more? I telephoned my style consultan...

Almost all of them used one word - the countryside - and almost all of them immediately qualified it by saying that they knew, of course, that this was a mythic England, the real England being one of the most urbanised countries in the world. As for ...

They talk anxiously about traffic jams, dirty streets, the high levels of crime, as though none of these problems exists outside capital cities. If you want to talk authoritatively about parking problems, try living next door to a country church on a...

Meanwhile, the number of new homeless families remains at historically high levels. Last year local authorities took in 140,000 households, three times the level of the late Seventies when Margaret Thatcher was first elected. Whisper it quietly, but ...

Now, we are told, O'Grady shouldn't have allowed himself to be shot down, and would have been rescued days earlier if he had known how to operate his survival radio and work out where he was. And when he was rescued, a sergeant had to knock his prime...

The one mistake is that, as a prisoner, I don't get paid pounds 1.50 per hour but pounds 1.50 per day. It may seem a small point, but for the prison population it is important. There are many outside prison who would love to get pounds 1.50 per hour,...

If employers restrict their visions to the flea markets, they will get flea-bitten. Why should I sympathise with policies to recruit at the lowest rates with the cheapest overheads, compliant ingenues unlikely to benefit any organisation? Thousands o...

The idea of re-creating that is one which will stir many Londoners. It certainly stirs me. Raphael Samuel London E1

A suggestion: could not those pictures be issued as a set of commemorative stamps? - in the usual denominations, and, of course, with a little red dragon in the top right-hand corner? They'd make lovely postcards, too. B Coffey Reading, Berkshire

Metering would save water, not only during summer droughts but also in the longer term, where users face the threat of steadily rising charges to meet the cost of increasing capacity to meet demands unrestricted by price. The objection that metering ...

Moreover, everyone knows that many priests do not keep their vows. The "Perpetua" described in Manzoni's classic The Promessi Sposi is still alive and sexually active in thousands of priests' homes in Italy, living as so-called "housekeepers". Enforc...

Tokyo saw the most dramatic rise in share prices, with the Nikkei index rising nearly a thousand points in a single session. In London, share prices enjoyed their biggest one-day rise since the pound left the European exchange rate mechanism in Septe...

Conservationists are not concerned about introduced species out of some raw prejudice against "foreigners". They are concerned because so many of the species introduced by man have ended up threatening the very existence of native species, either dir...

Their grant was from the Foundation for Sport and the Arts (FSA), not the lottery, and it might well have been larger - and nearer to what my daughters require but for the lottery, whose effect has been to diminish the funds available to the FSA. My ...

Few of us doubt the value of a vocation to celibacy and have met priests who exemplify its virtues, but it is clear that a vocation for the priesthood does not necessarily include a vocation for the celibate life. For diocesan clergy, unlike those in...

The postwar "traditional" Conservative Party of Macmillan and Heath took a one-national, generally pro-European stance. The party under Mrs Thatcher changed all that radically. Her views represented not "traditional Conservative values" but a distinc...

Hoffman, sullen and confused, was feted by his proud and adoring parents; offered all sorts of jobs by his father's friends (recall the memorable dialogue: "Ben, I want to say just one word to you. Plastics." "Plastics?" "Plastics."); and ended the d...

Although Britain has added her voice to those calling for the immediate release of those under detention and trial, more is needed if political and economic pressures from abroad are to help normalise the situation in Nigeria. Nigeria should be suspe...

Nor was this a statistical fiddle arrived at by massaging the figure(s) - the evidence was tangible. But as with all economic statistics, it is worth trying to turn the abstract into the concrete. Four stone equals 56lbs. Turn this into, say, 56 one-...