Letters: Briefly

MICHAEL WHITE is wrong to assume that the placing of Sibelius's Kullervo Symphony on Finnish National Day was 'fortuitous' (The Critics, 13 December). It was planned that way.

Humphrey Burton, Artistic Director

Tender is the North

WILLIAM LEITH attributes the original concept of deposit banking to a 17th-century English goldsmith (Review, 13 December).

In fact banking was an established activity in central Italy early in the 13th century. A group of Sienna noblemen were bankers to the Holy See. No doubt their activities were more akin to merchant banks than deposit banks, but they must have developed over the years into deposit taking.

English goldsmiths may have been the first to introduce deposit banking into England.

Peter Andras, Middlesex

TO publish a photograph of Princess Anne's second wedding above a picture of her first was the height of bad taste.

Phyllis E Stuffins, Altrincham

CLIVE HARFIELD (Letters, 13 December) suggests that motor projects simply teach young offenders 'to drive stolen cars more quickly'. A recent Home Office survey found that of 4,500 young people who had attended 21 motor projects, fewer than 100 had committed car-related offences while they were attending.

Vivien Stern, Director, National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, London SW9

THE SAGES and seers in Hindu have pointed out over the centuries that religion is but a stepping-stone to being absolute with the divine and that the divinity is within you ('Faith versus reason', 13 December). They are as appalled as I am to learn that after millennia it is acquiring an orthodoxy, leaders and all the trappings of an -ism as if it were Christianity, Islam, or Judaism.

Jiten Bardwaj, Bayford, Herts

WALLACE ARNOLD has been long enough in the trade to avoid such minor pitfalls as 'continued reverence of we, its subjects' (13 December). Fowler's Modern English Usage will make all the verbal mysteries clear to he, thus avoiding further disagreement between he and we, his loyal readers (dread word]).

D R Potts, Wellingore, Lincoln