Letters: Briefly

AL CAPONE'S rival on St Valentine's Day 1929 was rather more formidable than Bugsy Malone ('Those Valentines in full . . .', Real Life, 14 February). If Capone's men had used tommy- guns which fired ice cream and cakes like those used in the 1976 gangster spoof film Bugsy Malone, then George 'Bugs' Moran's gang would have suffered a less bloody fate.

Peter Croft, Wood Ditton, Cambs

. . . surely the killings were not organised by Al Capone - wasn't it Al Pacino? Or was it Al Martino, Al Jolson, Al Bowlly, Al Gore, Alvar Lidell, Al Fresco, Al anon, Haroun al-Rashid, Al Hambra or Al Dente?

Jack Harolds, Edinburgh

AM I TO understand that Jeffrey Archer was a student at Oxford University? ('How we met', 14 February).

Barbara Napier, Stockport

I CANNOT believe that you printed, without comment, the vilely racist epithet 'tar baby' which Lord Tebbit used to describe the Maastricht treaty. I understand that certain politicians express themselves in the language of the gutter but to report this without comment looks like complicity.

Rich Shepheard, London W11

IT WAS Alexander Pope who christened life a long disease, not Matthew Arnold as stated by Mick Imlah in his review of James Thompson's biography ('Sad days in the City of Dreadful Night', Review, 14 February).

Jonathan Bradley, Bolton