Those around at the time of the publication of The Satanic Verses may recall just how little sympathy this remarkable writer received from the great and the good (“Salman Rushdie has instructed us in a profound lesson: great literature will always be a matter of life and death”, News). Pope John Paul II, the archbishop of Canterbury, John le Carré, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Shirley Williams and many others thought the Mumbai-born author had brought the threat of an early demise on himself. He had decided to offend one of the great monotheistic religions and could expect those deeply offended by his book to take his life in the name of God.
Commenting on the fatwa in his book God is Not Great some years later, Christopher Hitchens wrote: “One might have thought that such arrogant state-sponsored homicide, directed at a lonely and peaceful individual who pursued a life devoted to language, would have called forth a general condemnation. But such was not the case.”
Bill Jackson
Nottingham
Authoritarian China
Regarding the regional tension caused by China’s recent military drills, your criticism of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit misses the point (“Nancy Pelosi’s reckless visit succeeded only in arousing an unstable China”, Editorial). It’s China’s disproportional and irrational reactions to such a visit that should be highlighted and strongly condemned.
Over recent years, China has threatened Taiwan militarily, incrementally heightening its threat. Pelosi’s visit is opportunistically used by China as a pretext to further escalate its threat to Taiwan in an attempt to change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. As some analysts have pointed out, even if Pelosi had not visited Taiwan, China would probably have seized another opportunity to achieve this aim.
China’s recent military drills are highly dangerous, provocative and threatening to regional peace and stability, while disrupting international trade and transport. Taiwan strongly condemns China’s irresponsible actions and calls on the international community to unify and support democratic Taiwan to push back China’s military threat and its ambitious expansionism in the Indo-Pacific region.
Criticising democratically elected leaders and prohibiting them from visiting democratic Taiwan because of China’s opposition will only embolden China and encourage more bullying. After all, if an authoritarian country can dictate what elected officials in democratic countries can do, this should be an alarming indicator of how far authoritarianism has been allowed to encroach upon our democracies.
Jo Hsu, Taipei representative office in the UK, London SW1
The wrong kind of influence
An excellent article by Jeffrey Boakye was undermined for me by your odd decision to include Michael Gove as one of the 40 “influential English lit graduates” we were being invited to celebrate (“What an English degree did for me”, the New Review).
When Mr Gove was education secretary, he made it very clear that under his watch education was to be purely transactional. Formal assessment was prioritised over creativity, and subjects that developed skills such as flexibility, autonomy and teamwork were systematically starved of funding, so the A-level menu in most state schools has become a shrunken shadow of what it was pre-Gove. We are now seeing the consequences of this playing out in higher education, as university after university drops or downgrades courses such as English Literature which don’t have an immediate monetary value.
As Boakye points out: “Ultimately, the real prize [of education] is insight and empathy.” Unfortunately, these qualities are notable by their absence in Gove’s career, which, in terms he would recognise, I would characterise as “inadequate”.
Austin McHale
Isleworth, London
Oxford, ancient and modern
Peter Young writes that Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao will be the first minority woman to have her name on an Oxford college (Letters). But two colleges founded in the 14th century were named after a Jewish peasant woman living in Roman-occupied Palestine 2,000 years ago. They are “the House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin in Oxford, commonly called Oriel College, of the Foundation of Edward II of famous memory, sometime King of England” and “St Mary’s College of Winchester in Oxford”, known as New College to avoid any confusion with Oriel. Among later foundations, St Anne’s College is named after Mary’s mother, and St Catherine would probably also fit the criteria.
Stephen Shaw
Kendal, Cumbria
Love by name…
Martin Love writing about his altruism (“Altruism is a selfless act. So why did helping a stranger leave me feeling so foolish?”, Magazine). Is this an example of nominative determinism?
John Langton
Bramhall, Stockport, Cheshire
Follow the Countryside Code
I live in a small village in one of the areas mentioned in your “On the water” special (Magazine). For many years, people have visited to walk on our public footpaths, swim or canoe on the waterways and enjoy our rich variety of wildlife, with very few problems.
In the last two years, the numbers have increased a great deal as we get “mentions” on various websites. We have no public toilets or facilities and people are parking illegally and inconsiderately. Many have no regard for the farm animals they pass or the wildlife habitats destroyed by litter and noise. Water birds are rarely seen in this stretch of the river now. Safety equipment has been vandalised.
I would like to think that Observer readers are more thoughtful, but it occurred to me that in the past, no such article would have appeared without a reminder of the Countryside Code: If our visitors followed this, the situation would be more manageable.
Jacky Bright
Address withheld
Football, the new religion
Two headlines caught my attention in the Sports section, not usually my first port of call in the Observer:
• “Pope relishes new fame with display befitting a king”;
• “Jesus roasts Leicester in sign of things to come”.
Can we expect some kind of second coming?
Elizabeth Sweetnam
Mosterton, Beaminster, Dorset
