How can it possibly be acceptable that two colleagues in their thirties, with the same income, may be paying very different loan repayments because of their parents' relative prosperity 15 years earlier? IAN JOHNSTON College Lecturer in Engineering S...

Aaron Kataria's spurious explanation that the Commissioners' concern is that their investments are not made in companies who are "wholly or mainly in [the defence] business" is morally indefensible. Did they not bother to read BAe's 1996 Annual Repor...

JIM TATCHELL Wokingham, Berkshire

What the correspondents were arguing about, I think, was why it was so funny - was the line funny? was the silence funny? was it a sketch or a one-liner? - and I am in the odd position that I should be able to settle all arguments, because I have act...

It may well take a century to see democratic lion-economies roaring out of Africa. Even so, for a continent that has long been written off as an economic and political basket-case it was a bold statement. What now must Clinton and the West - and Afri...

First, the acceptance by the Palestinians of a two-state solution to the conflict is itself a massive compromise on their part - Israel is built on what was Palestinian territory, with millions of refugees from that territory, and their dependants, n...

If the present government does have a big idea, it is that we should become a "high work" society. That is not to criticise the notion. Indeed given the adverse demographic headwind into which all developed countries will be butting, the only way inw...

While many great libraries around the world are housed in distinguished buildings, there are all too few instances where a collection of books created by one individual survive intact in the period architectural setting designed for them. King George...

The crisis in school teacher recruitment has been widely reported. If the subject matter related to the words in the article is typical of the general syllabus content for 11-year-olds, is it any wonder that teachers are leaving the profession in dro...

Dr Field suggests that many unwarranted claims are pursued, often at public expense, because it is "virtually impossible for someone to be interviewed by a psychiatrist and leave the consulting room without having some psychiatric label attached to t...

"We've got no advance men," he pleads. "We've got no protection." Pacino is unmoved. "It's OK, Kevin. That's where I'm going. I'm the Mayor." To a New York audience reared on generations of city bosses from La Guardia to Giuliani, the moment is insta...

You also quote Paul Flynn MP saying that contributors for a roof will be alarmed to find their money invested in the arms trade. The law is perfectly clear - money for the roof goes towards the roof. If any church were to divert designated donations ...

But with the White House now decamped to Africa for almost two weeks and the mist of sex allegations starting to clear, the joke may be on America. Perhaps it is not the President who has been distracted by Paula- Monica-Kathleen et al, after all, bu...

The fees certainly represent an historic shift. When I went to University, I received a full maintenance grant from Cheshire County Council which handsomely covered my cost of living. I could study as far away from home as I liked, without considerin...