Bad faith

Francis Wheen ("The poet of dialectics", July 8) mentions that Heinrich Marx, barred as a Jew from practising law in the kingdom of Prussia (not then an empire as Wheen has it), converted to Christianity. His wife did not, however, and brought their children up in the ancestral faith. Only in 1824, when Karl was six, were the children baptised, followed by their mother late in 1825. So it was after experiencing life first in a Jewish family and then in a Lutheran one that Karl rejected all religion.
Lawless Bethune
Launceston, Devon

Weird science

"The sky's no limit" by Brian Aldiss (July 8) has one puzzle for me. He complains that "the Higher Snobbery of literature regards science fiction as somehow beyond the pale". But later he says that "differing kinds of instruments ... make harmonious music. And thus our culture is raised to a higher level. Only to sink again under the impact of rock'n'roll." Now either that is a classic example of the Higher Snobbery (of music) or he is being ironic.
Frank Desmond

Brian Aldiss 's homage to the importance of Olaf Stapledon in the development of science fiction as a serious literary genre reminded me of a contemporary parallel. Stapledon wrote in his great future-history novel Last and First Men (1930) that man may well have to abandon the earth and seek out a new home elsewhere in the universe. This made CS Lewis apoplectic, spurring him to write his own science fiction in response (the Silent Planet books), featuring characters representing an embodiment of what, according to Lewis, Stapledon's views represented. Professor Stephen Hawking's revival of this idea has caused a similar frenzy of denunciation. Suddenly Stapledon's idea of time- cycles seem like evidently good sense
Peter Mills

No defence for empire

Ian Jack offers a Bangladeshi lascar's fond memories of London parks in defence of the Raj ("Things that have interested me", July 8). Every time my friend's grandmother turned on the tap, she thanked the "white man". My grandfather was given the title of "Rai Bahadur" for services to the empire. Yet the descendants of both went on to join the anti-imperialist struggle, while continuing to appreciate British parks, literature and music, just as many imperialists preferred exciting India to dreary Tunbridge Wells. The "richness of human experience" can remind us that neither the colonised nor the colonisers were a homogeneous group; that many colonised peoples benefited from empire, just as some colonisers learnt to critique it. But it also reminds us that colonialism was undemocratic, exploitative and racist, and ought to find no nostalgic defenders today.
Ania Loomba
Philadelphia, USA

How Ian Jack uses the employment of a few thousand lascar seamen to counter criticism of empire by a "polemical historian" is beyond me. The British granted limited concessions and privileges to certain castes, races or religions. This process of "divide and rule" helps explain why opposition was uneven. However, it didn't stop the lascars from organising the 1946 Royal Indian Naval mutiny which helped to usher in independence. The variety of human experience is sometimes used to obscure the crimes of empire.
Richard Knights

A warning to would-be writers

Melvyn Bragg may trumpet the new Creative Writing Academy ("Master classes", July 1), but readers - and writers - should know there is a contrary position. In a letter (December 27 1946) to Mrs Robert Hogan, a teacher who had written to Raymond Chandler asking for advice to give the young, he replied: "My experience with trying to help people to write has been limited but extremely intensive. I have done everything from giving would-be writers money to live on, to plotting and rewriting their stories for them, and so far I have found it to be all waste. The people whom God or nature intended to be writers find their own answers, and those who have to ask are impossible to help. They are merely people who want to be writers."
Anne Greer

Wandering eye

Craig Raine, deconstructing Modigliani's Reclining Nude ("Curves and angles", July 8), suggests that "the charm is the contrast between her angular curves and the slightly curved angles of the chair". Does he need to be so coy? I am sure Modigliani elongated the nude's waist to induce an onlooker's dilemma: does one submit to the pull of one's left eye, and linger on "the solid swell of the breasts", or does the right eye prevail, drawing the gaze to her pubic hair?
Giles Watson
St Mary's, Isles of Scilly

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