Letters

Vol. 48 No. 12 · 9 July 2026

Desertification

In his review of Judith Scheele’s history of the Sahara, Rahmane Idrissa cites the UN’s estimate that the Sahara ‘has claimed around an extra million square kilometres over the last century’, and remarks that Scheele ‘is cynical about desertification and uses the word with scare quotes’ (LRB, 4 June). The notion that the Saharan desert is advancing has been discredited. It is a clever marketing ploy by governments and the UN in the search for funding of improbable schemes. Countries in the Sahel have had an uplift of 20-30 per cent in rainfall since the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. Where farmers have been able to hold up against predatory governments and armed groups, harvests have been good and the landscape has been transformed through the natural regeneration of trees and simple soil conservation measures.

The desertification narrative was useful for both colonial and post-independence governments, enabling them to cast farmers and herders as architects of their own misfortune, and to justify interventions with modern ‘expertise’ – often with disastrous results, as evidenced by various irrigation schemes. Top-down solutions appeal to them more than the messy business of supporting local community action, promoting land rights and recognising the need to fuse traditional and modern forms of knowledge.

Camilla Toulmin Edinburgh

Beans

‘All games need scoring systems,’ David Runciman writes, ‘to make it possible to know who is winning’ (LRB, 4 June). I am reminded of a game played at my all-boys secondary school, which we called ‘Beans’. The boys who wanted to play would stand facing a wall, at varying distances from it, and one boy would throw a tennis ball. If the ball missed the wall, hit the ground before hitting the wall, or was caught having rebounded off the wall, the boy who threw it would be liable for ‘beans’. If a boy tried to catch the ball and failed, he too would be liable for beans (as he was if he could have caught it but refused). ‘Beans’ entitled every other boy to punch the recipient once on the upper arm.

There were other rules. When a boy caught the ball he had to take the next throw. If the ball wasn’t caught, the boy who was closest when it came to rest had to throw. If a boy threw the ball and missed the wall, as well as getting beans, he had to throw again from the same position. If a boy moved with the ball in his hands, he was liable to unlimited beans until he attempted a throw. Finally, if the ball went beyond the player furthest from the wall, all the boys would run to the wall, and the last one there would have to fetch the ball and throw. Inevitably, this would be the slowest boy in the group: finding himself too far from the wall to hit it with a throw, he would begin the unenviable trudge back into range while his classmates either punched him on the arm repeatedly or positioned themselves by the wall ready to catch the ball when he finally threw it.

There was no scoring system, and it was impossible to win. The only objective was not to lose. My own tactic was to stand in the middle of the group so that I would seldom be expected to catch the ball, and any catches that did come my way would be easier than if I stood closer. If I had to throw, I would be close enough to be accurate and reasonably forceful; and if we had to run to the wall, I knew I wouldn’t be last. All very sensible. But a more reliable way of not losing would have been to not play. I don’t know why any of us did. Perhaps it was just an excuse for bullying, but it seems an elaborate way to accomplish something that seldom needed excusing.

One day, one of the faster boys surprised us. The ball ran beyond the last player, and as we all ran to the wall, he ran in the opposite direction. He reached the ball while we were still at the wall and ran towards us. By the time we reached him, he was almost in range and moving so quickly that we couldn’t hit him with any force. He effectively got a free throw as we were all too busy chasing him to catch the ball. At the time I felt slightly thwarted, but you had to admire his ingenuity.

Jason Jawando Wolverhampton, West Midlands

Bonfire of the Universities

The online version of Stefan Collini’s piece on the collapse of British higher education was set alongside a photo of a protest I helped organise, as co-chair of Essex University and College Union, against the closing of the university’s Southend campus (LRB, 4 June). Essex fits the profile Collini describes: years of flatlining student recruitment leading to the abandonment of a satellite campus serving a deprived coastal town; departments merged or shut down; our once abundant language provision reduced to Spanish and French; institutional memory wiped clean with the ‘rationalisation’ of professional services; consultation with trade unions reduced to ritual formality. Our branch took extensive strike action, but the only time senior management appeared to care was when staff protested outside Lloyds, the university’s principal lender. Even this did not lead to leverage at the negotiating table.

The remedy, as Collini suggests, can only be national. That is why some of us in UCU are now trying to move towards a national dispute with the secretary of state over the funding of higher education itself. It isn’t easy, as a branch chair, to admit the limits of local pressure – we have no choice but to keep fighting where we are. But the limits are real. At one all-staff presentation, the vice-chancellor omitted trade unions from a slide listing the university’s ‘stakeholders’. At a later meeting, this was described as a ‘slip’. I resisted the urge to mention that I had been hired to lecture on Freud.

Jordan Osserman University of Essex, Colchester

Tactile Singers

Ardis Butterfield describes one of the singing monks in an illuminated initial from the Windmill Psalter as being ‘pushed from behind’ by another, who is ‘grasping his fellow monk’s waist’ (LRB, 4 June). Close physical proximity between singers is common in depictions of scholae gregorianae, and may not simply have been down to formal constraints, with the figures ‘jostling for space’ on the page. There are, for example, drawings of singers throughout the late Middle Ages and Renaissance which depict them touching one another’s shoulders. It’s been suggested that this may have been how the singers kept time.

I’m not so sure. I have sung my fair share of plainchant and it’s a real phenomenon that a group of singers on the move or at some distance from one another can stay well in time without a conductor, even when the pulse of the chant is flexible (though it’s hard to know much about what the rhythmic style of chant will have been when the Windmill Psalter was made in the late 13th century). That said, it’s worth remembering the medieval theorists’ term for the beat: tactus, a cognate with the sense of touch.

Stuart O’Hara London SE8

Ardis Butterfield refers to Pope Leo ‘preparing to hold Mass’. The correct terminology is ‘to celebrate Mass’ or ‘to say Mass’. Still, her choice of verb is happier than that of the Guardian journalist who recently wrote that Pope Leo XIV ‘performed Mass’.

Catherine McLoughlin London W14

Glitter and Dazzle

Daisy Hay refers to the costume worn to a masquerade in May 1749 by Lady Chudleigh (as ‘Iphigenia’) as having ‘from the waist up only a see-through gauze covering’ (LRB, 25 June). A contemporary engraving of the costume, as illustrated in Notable Historical Trials (1999), selected and edited by Justin Lovill, suggests that the costume was even more exiguous, consisting of a narrow belt of what look like fig leaves below her waist and a very fine gauze ‘skirt’ from her ribcage downwards. Otherwise she is quite naked. Of course, then as now, this may just be an example of the press’s disregard of accuracy for the sake of sensation.

The king was present at the masquerade. According to Historical Trials:

The 65-year-old George II approached ‘Iphigenia’ and asked if he might touch her breast. She took his hand in hers and said, within the hearing of those nearby, ‘Sir, I shall put it in a far softer place,’ proceeding to guide the king’s crabbed claw to his own head. He was so delighted that he bought her a watch costing 35 guineas with his own money, which was considered a remarkable thing.

Tony Stuart Sevenoaks, Kent

We Were Warned

Dinah Birch, writing about Sally Carson’s novel Crooked Cross, first published in 1934 and now reissued, lists a series of novels written in the 1930s that registered the growth and impact of fascism (LRB, 2 April). She doesn’t mention Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned (1935). The characters at the centre of the story, which takes place in Scotland, the industrial North of England, Oxford and the Soviet Union, attempt to find socialist solutions to the slide towards fascism. It contains convincing, vivid depictions of political activists in meetings, on the doorstep, at their kitchen tables and in their bedrooms. The novel’s publication was obstructed and delayed by Mitchison’s publisher friends Jonathan Cape, Allen Lane and Victor Gollancz, who worried about her frank exploration of free love and women’s experience (including an episode in an abortion clinic in Leningrad) in the aftermath of the censorship of D.H. Lawrence and Radclyffe Hall.

John Charlton Newcastle upon Tyne

More than a Village

Youssef Ben Ismail describes Rayy as ‘a village outside of Tehran’ (LRB, 21 May). Rayy is among the oldest extant cities in the world, with archaeological records showing occupation as early as 5500 bce. It was mentioned in Zoroastrian religious literature and biblical apocrypha and was the seat of several Iranian empires. Alexander the Great knew it as ‘Rhagai’ and raced through the city in pursuit of Darius III. Rayy became one of the great medieval Islamic cities and was home to the polymath scholars Abu Bakr al-Razi (known in the West as Rhazes) and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. It is Tehran that was little more than a village outside Rayy before it became Iran’s capital in 1786.

Alexander Jabbari University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Supersensual Ear

Patricia Lockwood, in her piece on Willa Cather, notes that the model for Thea in The Song of the Lark was Olive Fremstad, adding that ‘she was Swedish and had marvellously substantial arms’ (LRB, 2 April). There is more to say. Fremstad was indeed born in Stockholm, in 1871, and was like so many of Cather’s subjects an immigrant to the US. Arriving at the age of twelve, she was adopted by a couple in the small town of St Peter, Minnesota, and began her musical career playing the organ in the local Lutheran church. She took singing lessons in New York then, like Thea, moved to Germany. Her triumphant debut at the Met, in 1903, was as Wagner’s Sieglinde, the same role in which Thea makes her breakthrough. Though twice briefly married, Fremstad lived for seven years in the 1910s with the music critic Mary Watkins Cushing – a parallel to Cather’s relationship with Edith Lewis.

David Shengold New York

Shivers

Nicholas Spice’s description of the way the finale of Schubert’s B flat piano sonata unfolds gives the lie once more to the claim, made by Martin Mull or Elvis Costello or Frank Zappa or whoever it was, that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ (LRB, 19 March). This challenge was also gleefully accepted by the daughter of a friend the other week. She nailed the Shard.

Roderick Chadwick Durham

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