Sir: That Steven Norris, an Under-Secretary of State for Transport, has become a committed cyclist is excellent news. May we hope that he will soon take the next step, and identify also with walkers? You report that he could not "understand the probl...

Sir: I read your leading article on the sale of British Rail's Red Star parcels business with great amusement ("Red star over new Labour", 23 August). Alone among the entire press corps, your leader writer has discovered that giving an incompetent ma...

Hey! Hey! Can you hear me in there? Yes. I can hear you. There's no need to knock so loud. So, what's all this Microsoft Windows '95 bloody nonsense about then? It's about the next generation of technology. It's like Gutenberg with knobs on. It's abo...

Sir: For over 12 years we lived in a cottage without mains water. The original supply seeped into a hole cut in the rock (and turned red in the summer with daphnae). I constructed an underground tank and fed rainwater into it from the roofs, through ...

Sir: I wish you would not keep calling Sir Edmund Hillary "the first man to conquer Everest", when he did conquer it jointly with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay - and that is official. Obviously, the men did not step on the summit at precisely the same moment...

Sir: The alarming allegations surrounding the Nine O'Clock Service in Sheffield serve to highlight the real danger now posed by the Charismatic Movement, not only to the Church of England but to most of the mainstream churches. In a time of declining...

Sir: I was delighted to read how much Steven Norris enjoyed his bicycle ride, at the invitation of the Independent, along the towpath of the Regent's Canal. I was also rather sorry to read that Mark Bensted, on behalf of British Waterways, felt that ...

Lord Whitelaw's "short, sharp shock" centres of the early 1980s were abandoned as a failure. Home Office research showed that militaristic regimes for young offenders had no effect on recidivism rates, and did not reduce the overall level of youth cr...

Sir: Michael Price's article "How anguished anglers stop us hosing the roses" (Science, 22 August) was enlightening on the causes and effects of drought, but he seems to dismiss adequate river flows as important only to anglers and people in picture-...

Sir: When serving in Burma as an RAF intelligence officer, I had occasion to meet Aung San, commander of the Burmese guerrilla forces (and father of the admirable Dung San Sucho) and Thakin Than Tun, leader of the Burmese Communist Party. They told m...

Sir: While one can admire the Tibetan sentiment, "It is better to have lived one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep" (report, 18 August), there is perhaps also something to be said for Ecclesiastes 9: 4-6: But he who is joined with all t...

Newspaper editors are only the executive agents of British voyeurism and hypocrisy, constantly dodging between what they know their readers really want and the demands from politicians. The ministers are speaking on behalf of those same readers (who ...

Sir: I write to express both indignation and sorrow at the treatment accorded to the representatives of the Indian Army who marched in Saturday's VJ Day Parade and for many of whom an otherwise memorable day was sadly marred. The 14th Army, under the...

It was wet and sticky. It was called rain. Police cars toured the area, asking us to keep calm and not have a go. Umbrella makers danced in the street, hardly daring to hope that bankruptcy might be avoided after all. People who had stayed up all nig...

No one, not even those most imbued with civic pride for their native city, would think to compare Cardiff with prelapsarian Eden, but the Welsh capital is this week the venue for an activity with profound roots in our culture: the naming of the plant...

Sir: There is, says Andrew Marr ("Labour's president without precedent", 22 August) no serious possibility that Tony Blair's New Labour will engage in large-scale neo-Keynesian policies. The Delors employment package (delayed in the UK by Conservativ...

Zaire claims that it has had no choice but to take this action - and that criticism from the West is hypocritical and unhelpful. With no sign of a large-scale return to Rwanda by the refugees, the Zairean authorities were faced with the de facto crea...

Sir: Could I send out a plea to shopkeepers and authorities to wash the pavements during this protracted dry spell? The road sweepers do a wonderful job to clear the litter from our streets, but how much sweeter would our cities be with freshly washe...