The Spectator

Hearts as well as heads Sir: Simon Jenkins suggests we should stop remembering and start forgetting about the first world war (‘Don’t mention the war’, 10 November). His beef is with artists in particular, claiming that art ‘drenches history in emotion’. He prefers to read history books. No one would argue against history books, but surely it is not a question of either/or. Artists tell a story in a different way from historians, often to a different audience. They can move people to want to find out more: to look in the box of letters in the attic, to find out about their family connection to the war, to think again about the past and how it impacts on our present. Good history books open our minds to new ideas and perspectives.

It is cricket The use of a baseball expression, backstop, for possible arrangements over the Irish border could upset some Brexiteers. Yet the concept of a ‘backstop’ can be traced to a much more British game, cricket. The use of ‘backstop’ for what we would now call a wicket keeper was first recorded in the Oxford Dictionary in 1819. Seventy years later it cropped up in baseball, as a name for a fence rather than a person. When, in 1890, baseball players started calling the catcher a backstop too, the fence became, in effect, a backstop to the backstop. Big swims Ross Edgley became the first person to swim round the British coast, covering 1,791 miles in four months, starting and finishing in Margate.