IoS letters, emails & online postings (13 July 2014)

While I can see that the EU judgment on "the right to be forgotten" has caused problems for journalists, it seems absurd for Jane Merrick to describe it as a curtailment of liberty, or even to say that "it is not a great time for journalism" (6 July). The great journalists of the past somehow managed without the internet at all; and as Merrick herself points out, in Egypt three Al-Jazeera journalists have been imprisoned for seven years: that certainly is a curtailment of liberty, with which the loss of access to some facts on Google can hardly be compared.

John Dakin

Dunstable, Bedfordshire

Last Sunday you published a century-old photograph of King George V with various dignitaries including one you described as "Henri Poincaré, President of France". But the first name of President Poincaré was Raymond. You have confused him with his cousin, the mathematician Henri Poincaré, he of the Poincaré Conjecture. Henri Poincaré, like all mathematicians and almost all scientists, is little-known to the general public but as a historical figure he is incomparably more important than his cousin. He counts among the most influential mathematicians of all time, in the class of Gauss, Euler, Hilbert and Newton.

Professor Gregory Sankaran

University of Bath

I loved your coverage of the first stage of the Tour de France (6 July), but Simon Turnbull had to go and spoil it. In an article sprinkled with "t' Tour" references he tells us that the accents he heard on the walk into Harrogate were mostly of "the Yorkshire derivation". Well, fancy that! It is Yorkshire, after all. Can't you simply rejoice that the Tour has come to Yorkshire without constantly harping on about the "Northernness" of it? OK, so it's in the North. Get over it.

Pippa Lewer

Morpeth, Northumberland

I'm not sure why DJ Taylor thinks the number of middle managers is in decline ("Where have all the middle managers gone?" 6 July). As a union officer I represent a range of them, even though it might surprise some sections of the media that such people are often members of a trade union these days.

He is on much stronger ground when he argues that the world of work has changed from the time when it was perfectly acceptable to do a competent day's work without the need to work in the evenings and at weekends. The use of email and the internet far from reducing workloads, has in fact created many new possibilities to check things and tell those who previously didn't know, and probably didn't need to know, what the outcome is.

One might conclude that the workplace has simply become a less pleasant place than it was some years ago, until one recalls that at least these days it is not always quite so dominated by white men in suits.

Keith Flett

London N17

Katy Guest is wrong to say the landline is dead ("Long live good manners", 6 July). For although mobile usage continues to grow, many keep a landline as part of a package that includes internet access. And as long as the cost of phoning a mobile remains high, there will be many of us sticking to the more traditional technology who do not want to be at everybody's beck and call all day.

Tim Mickleburgh

Grimsby, Lincolnshire

I have never used either a computer or a mobile phone. I am comfortable in a world of one-to-one contact, aided by pen, paper, print and post, with the very occasional phonecall. And this letter is, of course, handwritten.

David Seymour

London SE4

How exactly does removing a lobster and two brown crabs "from a fisherman's lost pot" constitute foraging? ("Lunch on the Beach", New Review, 6 July)? Where I come from we call that theft.

Janet Wynne Evans

London, W5