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Sir: The ‘best joke of the year’ supplied by Dr Jonathan Sacks to Andrew Marr (Diary, 17/24 December) is of much older vintage than apparently suggested by the Chief Rabbi. Generations of philosophy students have known the story of how Professor Sidney Morgenbesser punctured the Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin, who at a lecture in the 1950s at Columbia University stated that while many languages employed the double negative to denote a positive (‘He is not unlike his sister’), none used a double positive to make a negative. Morgenbesser, who was in the audience, waved his arm dismissively: ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Morgenbesser, who came from New York’s Lower East Side, was justly celebrated for his use of Jewish humour to settle matters of metaphysics and epistemology. Asked by a student if he believed it possible for a statement to be simultaneously both true and false, he replied, ‘Well, I do and I don’t.’ Towards the end of his long final illness (he died in 2004), Morgenbesser asked his fellow Columbia philosopher David Albert: ‘Why is God making me suffer so much? Just because I don’t believe in him?’
Dominic Lawson
Dallington, East Sussex
Sir: I am delighted to discover that Michael Gove is a QPR fan (‘Dear Mary’, 17/24 December) and hope that he succeeds in persuading his son to carry on the family allegiance. Please tell the boy from me that we will do all we can to make supporting Rangers a rewarding and satisfying experience. Come on you Rs!
Amit Bhatia
Vice-chairman, QPR, Loftus Road
Sir: I was interested in Tanya Gold’s piece about the degeneration of Leicester Square (Food, 10 December). I enjoy baffling friends my age by telling them I went to school in Leicester Square. I still have an affection for the streets around there, though the square itself is unrecognisable. The school was on the north side, run by Catholic nuns. My brother and I used to walk there from where we lived in New Row. For two little boys, the area was a wonderful place to live in the 1950s. There were no rules. We didn’t exist. And towards the Strand there were many bomb sites where we played out of site below street level. Covent Garden was where you could find surplus fruit and veg left lying around. Recently I tried to find where the school had been. There is a church but nobody working there knows anything. I am sure some Spectator reader must remember going to school in Leicester Square?
Paul M. Fenton
France
Sir: In his review of Oliver Matuschek’s biography of Stefan Zweig, Jonathan Mirsky (Books, 10 December) advised interested readers to turn to Zweig’s two fine novels, Beware of Pity and The Post Office Girl!, which Matuschek has scarcely mentioned. May I add to Mirsky’s reading list? Zweig also wrote a remarkable autobiography The World of Yesterday in 1942, of which a beautiful translation by Anthea Bell was published by Pushkin Press (again) in 2009. To my surprise Matuschek makes no reference to it.
It is a moving evocation of the golden age of Vienna in the years up to the outbreak of the first world war. Zweig’s account of this ‘Golden Age of Security’ (his phrase) is rendered all the more wistful by the sad events which followed, to which he does painful justice: the Great War itself; and then its aftermath leading to the emergence of Hitler and Zweig’s own exile. Of greatest interest to most readers will probably be the account of pre-war Vienna. However, it is a fascinating piece of autobiography as well, even if there are — unsurprisingly given his character — some notable gaps, of which the most important is perhaps the last few years from 1939 until his tragic suicide in 1942.
Adam Ridley
London SW6
Sir: Quentin Letts (‘What I really, really want’, 17/24 December) seems to have left off his list to Santa the one thing he really needs: a large supply of Prozac.
Dr Bendor Grosvenor
Middlesex
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