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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: How curious that the famous healer Jack Temple should diagnose Diana, Princess of Wales, as suffering from lead poisoning as the consequence of piercing her cheek with a sharp lead pencil (Deborah Ross interview, 7 September). "Lead" pencils have not contained lead for over a century, lead having been replaced by graphite as the black core. It does make one wonder how reliable his other diagnoses are.
JOHN CROOKS
Teddington, Middlesex
Sir: If Bill Clinton decides finally to confront his accusers rather than cravenly trying to appease them, he might take heart from the following observation:
" 'Tis too frequent with noble men to be dishonest; piety, chastity and such like virtues are for private men: not to be much looked after in great courts... . Montaigne in his essayes, gives instance in Caesar, Mahomet the Turke, that sacked Constantinople, and Ladislaus King of Naples, that besieged Florence: great men, and great soldiers, are commonly lascivious."
- Robert Burton, The
Anatomy of Melancholy.
JOHN ROE
York
Sir: I teach basic skills to 16- to 20-year-olds at an employment project in Newham, East London. Among the "clients" I work with are disorientated and traumatised refugees, excludees from secondary education, child-mothers, former inmates of young offenders' institutions, young people with mild to moderate learning difficulties or behavioural problems and teenagers marginalised by poverty from participation in society.
Wouldn't a more fitting title for your Magazine cover feature on 5 September have been "Sex, Drugs and Pocket-money: What it Means to be Sixteen and Middle Class"?
MIKE DIBOLL
London SE16
Sir: In relation to the correspondence on cruelty to shellfish, it was good to see that the Government is taking steps to prevent the indiscriminate slaughter of lowly bacteria("Warning bell sounded on over-use of antibiotics", 4 September). We must hope that viruses will be next.
ROBERT A SANDOW
Twickenham,
Middlesex
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