Sir, - Angela Doyle (An Irishwoman's Diary, August 30th) should have chosen a more appropriate writer than Charles Kingsley to quote as a eulogist for Henry Brooke.
Kingsley was an appalling racist who ranted against everything that was not Anglo-Saxon. When he visited Sligo in 1860, he wrote to his wife: "I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country . . . To see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much."
This from a man who was chaplain to Queen Victoria and regius professor of modern history at Cambridge! - Yours, etc.,
Gerard Clarke, 4 Stirling Park, Orwell Road, Dublin 14.