FRANCIS STUART

Sir, - Having recently read Francis Stuart's Black List Section H, my attention was drawn to the sentence cited from the book…

Sir, - Having recently read Francis Stuart's Black List Section H, my attention was drawn to the sentence cited from the book by your correspondent on November 21st: "If there was a Jewish idea, which was surely a contradiction, it was a hidden, unheroic and critical one, a worm that could get into a lot of fine-looking fruit.

In isolation, its meaning is ambiguous. In context, the sentence reads clearly as a prefigurement in the mind of H (Stuart's fictional counterpart in the novel) of the diabolical "Jewish idea" which was later to prevail in Nazi Germany, and not as a baldly anti-Semitic statement as suggested by your correspondent. It it were such, would H admire the humility and pragmatism of the Jewish character in the preceding line of the novel? - Yours, etc.,

Rathdown Park, Dublin 6W.