Not cricket
Sir: Many a cricket follower (‘Cricket’s foreign legion’, 6 March) would join Peter Oborne in denouncing the growth of South African mercenaries entering our domestic game. As a county cricket spectator, I have always enjoyed scouting for new talent for our national team. It gave me great pleasure to watch an emerging Michael Vaughan score a double century at Scarborough in the early days of his career, and see Graeme Swann spin-bowling for Northamptonshire: both of them with obvious England potential. Somehow it is not quite the same these days, as we survey the array of journeyman players.
John Walker
Abingdon
By the book
Sir: Professor Ekirch (Letters, 6 March) clearly believes in the old orator’s trick, ‘Argument weak, speak louder’. Initially he claimed that the disinheritance of James Annesley, the subject of his own book, ‘inspired’ R.L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped, but now in response to scepticism he loudly declares that Annesley’s fate provided the ‘template’ for the novel. But had the professor actually read Kidnapped he would surely know that, the title aside, it is in fact about the adventures of David Balfour and Alan Breck in the wake of the 1745 uprising, and that Stevenson’s widow had very explicitly stated the novel to have been inspired by a contemporary account of the murder of Colin Roy Campbell in 1752. In support of his unsustainable thesis, Ekirch can only offer his own feeble double negative: ‘It is inconceivable that Stevenson… was un-familiar with the saga of James Annesley’, and a throwaway speculation in the same vein by a reviewer in the long-departed Athenaeum. I suspect the greater longevity of the Spectator is due in no small measure to the greater rel-iability of its reviewers.
Andro Linklater
Kent
Ayn shrugged
Sir: In view of the forthcoming election I think your readers may have benefited more had James Delingpole (You know it makes sense, 6 March) focused his analysis on Ayn Rand’s other great work, Atlas Shrugged, rather than The Fountainhead.
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