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Why Boris is Boris SIR: I write to correct some clear inaccuracies in the September issue. My wife was the great niece of Boris Litwin, a wealthy Jewish businessman in Mexico City. His daughter, Barbara (Bapsi), my wife’s cousin, knew Stanley Johnson at the time when he was proposing a tour to the Americas. Barbara said to Stanley that if they got to Mexico City they should look up her father. This they did, and Boris Litwin entertained them. Stanley’s partner was pregnant and Boris, concerned about the long journey back to New York by bus, gave them air tickets to fly direct. It was then that Stanley said that if the child was a boy he would be called Boris. This can be corroborated if necessary. Lindsay East, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire
Rudolf Hess’s snowman SIR: In ‘I Once Guarded Rudolf Hess’ (August issue), Valentine Cecil describes Hess making a snowman and says, ‘He had built the head separately from the body […] I did wonder if this mode of snowman-building had some Nazi link’. If it did, then every snowman ever built anywhere in North America has had a Nazi link – here, we always make our snowmen in separate sections, rolling one big snowball for the base, one slightly smaller for the chest and one
smaller still for the head. How do you do it in the UK? Perhaps there isn’t enough snow to roll, and you scrape and pat it into a little mound? Puzzled and curious, Elizabeth Cowan, Picton, Ontario, Canada
Super Minis SIR: Reading your article about the Mini Cooper (August issue) brought back wonderful memories of my youth when, in my early driving years, I borrowed two Minis (non- Coopers) from my elder sister and managed to dent them both. A friend of ours told me she had acquired a new car and I asked what it was. She replied it was a cooped-up Mini Super which described a souped-up Mini Cooper quite perfectly. Trevor Edwards, Eye, Suffolk
Go to Hell, scammers!
‘Martial arts is next door. This is marital arts’ 44 The Oldie October 2021
SIR: The article on Dante by A N Wilson (September issue) prompts an immediate response to his lasting relevance in our troubled times. One thing I have retained from studies long ago is Dante’s distinction in the Divine Comedy between malizia and frode in the treatment of criminals in the Inferno.
There it is related that those guilty of the latter – fraudsters of all ilk: cheats, con men and tricksters – were singled out to be roasted in a much hotter circle of Hell than the former, mere murderers, rapists and the like. As a victim of an online scam, subsequently enlisting as a trading standards monitor, I delight in the thought that a similar severity might be meted out to the woefully few scammers who don’t get away with it. Given the opportunity, I’ve delighted in tutoring Dante to the police dealing with my own misfortune. Michael Rand Hoare, London SW17
Merchant navy blues SIR: I was very disappointed to note that Merchant Navy Day (3rd September, every year) did not get a mention in September’s Quite Interesting Things. We (rightly) keep hearing about the plight and shortage of lorry drivers, but we never hear a dicky bird about the hard-pushed merchant seafarers who relentlessly ensure that our goods are exported and, more importantly, that all the food, raw materials and consumer goods we need are imported. As an island nation, we rely on the UK sea-freight industry for 95 per cent
