Moby-Dick reading marathon pioneers
Excellent to see the proto-modernist-genderqueer-futurist vibes of Moby-Dick being hymned in marathon readings in the US (‘People are rooting for the whale’, 8 December). But just as Melville’s book was first published in London in 1851, so the UK pioneered the first digital marathon, mobydickbigread.com, hosted by the University of Plymouth, entirely free of charge, with Tilda Swinton, David Attenborough, Witi Ihimaera, Benedict Cumberbatch, Musa Okwonga, Cerys Matthews, Stephen Fry, Fiona Shaw and Neil Tennant among the readers, and artworks by Anish Kapoor, George Shaw, Dorothy Cross and Gavin Turk. We read it for you, so you didn’t have to.
Philip Hoare and Angela Cockayne
Southampton
• Your heartwarming editorial on the success of Horrible Histories (6 December) might have made mention of its progenitor (and one of its inspirations?), Sellar and Yeatman’s classic prep school parody of British history, 1066 and All That. Happily, still in print (and still on my shelf).
Clyde Jeavons
Birchington-on-Sea, Kent
• As Nick Candy is unveiled as the new Reform UK Ltd treasurer, one wonders what happened to the last one? Purged, one must presume. As John Crace notes (The politics sketch, 10 December), Nigel Farage falls out with everyone in the end.
Keith Flett
Tottenham, London
• Angela Rayner’s vicious diatribe against newts (Prioritise people’s needs ‘over newts’ in housing policy, says Angela Rayner, 8 December) is clear evidence of the rise of the insidious “anti-newt lobby”. Won’t somebody please think of the efts?
Phil Coughlin
Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne & Wear
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