Could it be that, shockingly and bizarrely, under this Labour government there are more poor and more suffering inequality in Britain today than even under Thatcher or Major?MIKE ABBOTT Kew, Surrey Mobile moments Sir: On a recent visit to Venice we observed with delight a gondolier talking into a mobile phone while sculling with his other hand. The BL catalogue usually gives basic information only; certainly there is no indication of value or rarity. Specialist booksellers actually know what they are talking about (most of the time) and have clear ideas of rarity and value – and acceptable condition.BRIAN LAKE Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers London WC1 Lurch to the right   Sir: We’ve now got something of a full house of b?s noires: Bush as US President, Sharon as Israeli PM, Howard as Tory leader and now, the cherry on top of the cake, possibly Paisley as Northern Ireland First Minister. Stop the world: I want to get off!PAUL WALTER Newbury, Berkshire Old trouble Sir: Terence Blacker’s article “Watch out: grey power is taking over” (28 November) is interesting and, by and large, balanced. But I do deplore the sentence “For the first time, there are now more people in Britain over 60 than there are under 16, a situation which, with the declining birth rate, will get progressively worse.” Worse for whom? Is The Independent institutionally ageist?JOHN BREWSTER (aged 67) Hexham, Northumberland Seasonal gloom Sir: I do not recall a Christmas when more charity appeals have fallen out of newspaper colour supplements or through letter boxes. That’s it.Suggesting that such a simple technical device will have devastating effects on the antiquarian book trade is nonsensical. On this matter, higher education staff and the public at large are clearly at one.TERRY McKNIGHT President, Association of University Teachers London WC1 Not devastated Sir: Your piece “British Library opens a new chapter: helping Amazon storm the antiquarian book market” (25 November) was an Amazon promotion dressed up as news – confused and confusing.Quite simply, Amazon have linked their site with the British Library’s on-line public access catalogue – currently freely available to anyone on the net anyway.

To the contrary, with indiscriminate bombing all we knew was that some poor family, or families, were to suffer. There was no praying that we in particular should be spared.Yes, we would watch the doodlebugs flying, listen to the droning engine and wait anxiously for the abrupt silence, witness the silent glide and then experience the dreadful explosion. No one derived any satisfaction that they had been the lucky ones that time. At school we were taught in our classrooms and only went to the school shelters at the wail of the siren. Older children sat their School Certificate examinations in the shelters whether or not an “alert” was on so that their tests were not interrupted. At the cinema, in the event of a raid, an “alert” caption was shown on the screen and the film continued so we, the audience, listened for the distinctive note of the doodlebug – no one left their seats.We did not pray that “the bomb would drop over the next street — any street but their own”. My parents decided that once the V-1 blitz started, we should sleep each night in our Anderson shelter so that we might have a night’s uninterrupted rest.Each working day adults went to work and children went to school.

All public services, transport, buildings and places of entertainment were open normally. However John Lichfield’s assertions about Londoners and their morale are a scandalous slur on the hard-pressed people.I was 12 years old and had just returned from three years’ evacuation when the doodlebugs rained down on London. This was a bombardment following on from regular and routine German bombing raids. Because the frequency of the latter had reduced we had taken to sleeping indoors again, only making for our Anderson shelter when aircraft could be heard. That would produce an independent and representative chamber which would suffer no careerist constraints in holding the executive to account and which could make a reality of the separation of powers.CHARLES SCANLAN London NW8Sir: A little less conversation, a little more action?STEPHEN CHALMERS-MORRIS Cheadle, Cheshire Under V-1 attack Sir: John Lichfield’s report (Review, 20 November), unquestionably identifies why Londoners are grateful to French spy Michel Hollard and, hopefully, full recognition of his efforts in saving London from being destroyed can and will be acknowledged.

I am one of 150,000 people in Britain waiting for this operation. Meantime the lump has grown bigger, it hurts and there is a one in ten chance of it throwing up a life-threatening complication.The number of hernias in our population is predictable. The spirit of Good Friday was easily summarised: no guns or else no government. The IRA began to hope that there could be a third way under which it would stay in Cabinet while retaining much of its weaponry, all its paramilitary structures and an intimidatory control over its own areas.The result was predictable: Unionist outrage. In the early Seventies, Martin McGuinness had been wanted for terrorist outrages Few Unionists believed that the charges were unfounded. Yet here he was, Minister of Education, while the IRA had not decommissioned and the authorities were making no attempt to prevent the paramilitaries running significant areas of working class Belfast. It is not just anti-Catholicism – after all, some of the paramilitaries are Protestant – which leads Unionists to object to the geographical entrenchment of a criminal sub-culture on a scale which had not hitherto been seen in modern Europe, north of Naples and Sicily.When all this was accompanied by moves to hollow out Unionist culture by eliminating royal associations and insignia from public buildings, and especially by renaming the RUC, there was an inevitable response.