Aline de Gunzbourg by George Hoyningen-Huene, 1934, taken in Paris shortly before her marriage to André Strauss

Lady Berlin, who has died aged 99 , was for more than four decades the adored and adoring wife of Sir Isaiah Berlin; she was also at different times in her life a principal shareholder and director of the Ritz Hotel in Paris and, as Aline de Gunzbourg and then Aline Strauss, a noted amateur golfer in France and England before the Second World War.

Belonging by birth and by her first marriage to the top echelon of French Jewry, she was already a widow with a young son when, in 1941, she escaped from the France of Hitler and Pétain for the safety of the United States. It was during the sea voyage to America that she was first glimpsed by Isaiah Berlin, then on his way to a British government posting in New York; but their marriage still lay 15 years ahead.

Aline Elisabeth Yvonne de Gunzbourg was born on January 4 1915 in London, the youngest of the four children of Baron Pierre de Gunzbourg and his wife Yvonne. The family lived in Paris, but at an early stage of the First World War had moved temporarily to London, fearful that the French capital would be shelled by German artillery. Aline had an English nanny and then governess, and so grew up speaking both English and French.

Her father Pierre was the son of Baron Horace de Gunzburg , the Russian-Jewish banker and philanthropist who received a barony from the Grand Duke of Hesse, whom he served as honorary consul in St Petersburg. It was Horace’s father, Evzel Gunzburg (son of the prosperous rabbi of Vitebsk), who made the family fortune, eventually founding banks in Kiev, Odessa and St Petersburg.

One of Baron Horace’s many philanthropic enterprises was the celebrated Jewish Encyclopaedia, the compilation of which offered hard-up Jewish writers and scholars the chance to earn some money. It was a work that Isaiah Berlin, as a boy in Russia, read voraciously.

Like other rich Russians of their day, Baron Horace and his parents spent part of every year in Paris, and even elected to be buried there rather than in Russia. Their surname became French in style, with the addition of an “o” after the “b”. Much of their wealth, including the family palace on Konnogvardeiskii Boulevard in the centre of St Petersburg, was lost in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.

Aline’s mother, Yvonne, was a daughter of Emile Deutsch de la Meurthe, of A Deutsch et Fils, the pioneering family-owned oil refinery and distribution business with operations across France, Spain, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Emile and his brother foresaw the opportunities for their business offered by the development of the internal combustion engine, and while promoting the French motor and aviation industries also introduced the first petrol pumps to France.

Aline grew up in Paris with her three siblings at 54 avenue d’Iéna, next door to the duc de Mouchy. An immense hôtel particulier that had been built by Emile Deutsch de la Meurthe in 1882, No 54 was later divided into four apartments. Emile occupied the first floor, the Gunzbourgs another, Yvonne’s sister Valentine Esmond and her family the third, and Baron Eugène Fould-Springer and his family the fourth.

The Gunzbourg household included two cooks; Alcide, the maitre d’hotel; and footmen, valets, lady’s maids and various other staff, as well as the nurses and governesses. The footmen wore the family’s dark green livery; the children’s prams and the family’s cars were painted in the same dark green, the cars with the Gunzbourg arms displayed on the side. A petrol pump was installed in the hôtel courtyard.

The Gunzbourgs also had a house at Garches, to the west of Paris on the edge of the St Cloud country club golf course, where, aged seven, Aline took up the game. She also played golf during family summer holidays with her Esmond cousins at North Berwick in Scotland, and by her late teens was becoming a well-known figure in the golfing world. In 1932 she was runner-up in the English girls’ championship at Stoke Poges, losing only at the 19th hole to Pauline Doran.

Two years later, in April 1934, she won the French Ladies’ Close Championship (open only to French golfers), the day after she had become engaged to be married. At St Cloud in 1937, now under her married name of Strauss, she again reached the final of this event, but was beaten 4 and 3 by her good friend Mme Renée Lacoste, the mother of the great French golfer Catherine Lacoste.

Aline had married André (“Dédé”) Strauss, son of the banker and Impressionist picture collector Jules Strauss, in Paris in October 1934. They had met through Dédé’s first cousin Antoinette, who was married to Aline’s elder brother Philippe. Following their marriage in the synagogue in the rue de la Victoire, the couple moved into an apartment on the second floor of 54 avenue d’Iéna, where their son Michel was born in September 1936.

As another war loomed, Dédé bought the 17th-century Château de Brécourt in Normandy as a country refuge for his young family. But by then he had been diagnosed with cancer and, although the disease went into remission, he succumbed to it in 1939, four months before the outbreak of war. In his memory Aline gave the Louvre a magnificent 17th-century bronze bust of King Louis XIV as a child.

With the German invasion of France in May 1940, Aline decided to head south. At the wheel of her 1937 black Bentley coupé (with a spare can of petrol in the boot) she drove from Brécourt to Biarritz in a day, but then was unable to obtain the exit visas needed to leave for Spain. In June, with the division of France into Occupied and Unoccupied (Vichy) zones, the Spanish border was closed to all. Brécourt was seized by the Germans.

When Pétain’s Vichy regime published the first of its anti-Jewish edicts in October, Aline was at Cannes with her parents and other family members. Having resolved that they must all leave for America, she managed to obtain visas from the American consulate in Nice and, with difficulty, exit visas from the Vichy authorities. She and her little boy then made their way by train to Lisbon and thence to New York, to be followed later by her parents and others.

New York was then filling up with refugees from France, among them Baron Robert de Rothschild and his daughter Cécile. Aline and Cécile played golf together on Long Island, and it was at a house there, in 1942, that Aline was introduced to Isaiah Berlin. She made more of an impression on him than he did on her: she could not follow what he said and thought him rather unprepossessing. He made no greater impression when they met again at a party in New York.

Then, in 1943, Aline met Hans Halban, a nuclear physicist who had escaped from France in 1940. Not long afterwards they were married and went to live in Montreal, where Hans was director of an atomic research laboratory. They were to have two sons, Peter and Philippe. In 1946 they moved to England, where Halban had been appointed to a post at Oxford. They settled at Headington House, and Isaiah Berlin became a regular guest and family friend.

The Halbans’ marriage was not wholly happy, and Aline liked Isaiah because he made her laugh. When Isaiah sailed for America in 1949, to go to Harvard, Aline happened again to be on the same ship, now on the way to visit her widowed mother in New York. During the voyage (two days longer than usual because the ship ran aground off Cherbourg) they became inseparable friends, but no more than that.

In 1952 Aline drove Isaiah to the summer music festival at Aix-en-Provence. The next year she visited him often in his rooms at All Souls as she helped him with a French translation of his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox. “I like her very much,” Isaiah wrote to a friend. “She is beautifully bred and altogether charming: and lives in a curiously detached way in Oxford, to which she does not belong in any sense and which she reacts to in a half sleepwalking fashion.”

Isaiah’s father, Mendel Berlin, died in December 1953, and a month or two later Isaiah asked Aline to give him a lift up to London, where he had to sort out some of his father’s affairs. During the drive up to London, Isaiah declared his feelings for Aline and touched her hand. Although Aline said nothing, she felt moved — and she remembered thinking: “Damn.” She began to see Isaiah, but then at Easter 1954, when Isaiah was staying with his mother at Nice, he received a letter from Aline breaking off relations. Hans Halban had overheard a long telephone conversation she had had with Isaiah, and was now threatening to divorce her and to take the children. Isaiah was so distressed that he took to his bed for two days.

Back in Oxford, he received a telephone call from an anguished Aline inviting him to drinks at Headington House. Halban, himself in some anguish, had decided that they should all try to remain on good terms. Soon, though, Aline and Isaiah were seeing each other again. Towards the end of 1954 Hans Halban accepted an offer from the French government to head a nuclear physics laboratory in Paris; Aline said she could not accompany him.

They agreed to a formal separation, and a fortnight later Isaiah Berlin proposed to Aline in the Oxford botanical garden. When her mother, who had met, and liked, Isaiah, heard that Aline was to marry him, she exclaimed: “Mais il est inépousable!” But once Aline’s divorce from Hans Halban had been finalised, they were married, on February 7 1956, at Hampstead Synagogue. Isaiah was knighted the next year.

^{Isaiah and Aline Berlin in 1955}

During more than 40 years of marriage thereafter, the Berlins did everything they could together, in Oxford, where Isaiah became the founding president of Wolfson College, and further afield. With their base at Headington House, they also had a flat in London (a set of rooms in Albany) and they built a house at Paraggi, above Porto Fino on the Ligurian coast of Italy. They had a very extensive circle of friends and an active social life.

There were annual visits to New York and Jerusalem, and wherever they went as the years went by they were feted at receptions and dinners. They attended countless concerts, operas and music festivals, seldom missing a season at Glyndebourne, Salzburg or Pesaro. They attended as many of their friend Alfred Brendel’s concerts as they could. Isaiah would describe his recreations as “my wife and listening to music”.

Aline Berlin’s connection with the Ritz Hotel in Paris came about through her father’s first cousin Baron Jacques de Gunzbourg, who was one of the hotel’s founders. When Jacques’s son Nicky, the socialite, decided to dispose of the Ritz shares he had inherited, Aline’s father bought them and gave them to her. Her fellow shareholders and directors included Charles Ritz and Stavros Niarchos. Eventually the hotel was sold to Mohamed Fayed.

Sir Isaiah died in 1997. Two years later Lady Berlin travelled to Latvia, when the country’s authorities installed a commemorative plaque on Isaiah’s childhood home in Riga. As a trustee of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust she was instrumental in the continuing publication of Sir Isaiah’s work and letters, a process which gave her the greatest pleasure.

A frail, elegant figure, always immaculately dressed, Lady Berlin continued to travel, and to keep up a busy social life well into her eighties. She tended to avoid large gatherings, but would think nothing of a day-trip to Paris. Latterly, as her activities became restricted by increasing ill health, she none the less continued to receive a steady stream of devoted family members and friends.

Lady Berlin is survived by her three sons.

Lady Berlin, born January 4 1915, died August 25 2014

I am one of a generation of Scots who understand politics as power. What is happening right now is that people all over Scotland are talking to each other about what is in the best interests of themselves, their children and their neighbours. As Monday’s debate evidenced, ‘“ordinary” people are holding politicians to account (Salmond emerges on top in tough TV debate, 26 August). The phenomenon is nothing short of sensational and yet the Guardian sticks to the same old analysis, deploying a frame of reference about the nature of a politics that most of the public have already rejected, one way or another.

In Scotland people are realising that democracy is not an empty word, it is a state of mind – we can do this if we want to. The old elites, including those in the media, must move aside to let different voices have their say.
Ann Jamieson
Cambridge

• As expected, Alex Salmond won the stairhead rammy that passed for a second debate on points. But other referendums show that the side supporting the status quo does not need to win the debate – it just needs to show that a vote for change involves risks and uncertainties.

The first minister’s improved performance will not turn public opinion around and it looks beyond doubt that Scotland will vote against a break-up of the United Kingdom. There were just too many intractable problems – pensions, jobs, public spending, tax-base shrinkage, oil, green energy, black-outs, defence and, above all, currency.
Dr John Cameron
St Andrews

• I’m sure I can’t be alone in feeling frustrated at the level of referendum debate. There is also a hint of embarrassment at the thought that the rest of the UK was watching the bickering, but the main issue was that we learned nothing new, and pre-match analysis had already told us that Darling would pick up on the currency debate again, while Salmond would go for the NHS jugular. How would an independent Scottish government respond to what is going on in Syria, and with Isis? Would it stop sending patients to private hospitals? How would it fund pensions, increased childcare, “free” personal care for the elderly, or renationalising Royal Mail? What contingency plans are in place for when businesses and banks move their headquarters south? Whether I think about it from a self-centred perspective, or from concern for my children and future generations, I am alarmed that such a momentous decision will be made on the basis of plans that are so lacking in information and transparency, and which seem, as your editorial suggests (Not so different, 26 August), to take no account of wider world matters.
Dr Sally Cheseldine
Edinburgh

• Your editorial rightly says that an independent Scotland will still face the policy dilemmas produced by global capitalism. But it might have the freedom to show more courage, and protect institutions such as the NHS, libraries etc (Losing the plot, 26 August).
John Haworth
Visiting professor in wellbeing, University of Bolton

• Helping the Better Together campaign in the Borders last week, I was told by a voter on the doorstep: “My heart says yes to independence; my head says no.” Yet surely there are as many, if not more, reasons for the heart to say no as well as the head, something the debates have not yet properly recognised. So many of us have mixed heritage and have family and friends across all parts of the UK. Those of us living just south of the border feel these emotional and kinship links particularly strongly and view with alarm the creation of an international frontier between us. Being British as well as Scottish or English is important to us – as another voter said to me: “I’m not giving up my British passport for anyone.” Perhaps, too, someone should remind Alex Salmond that our NHS was introduced by a Welsh secretary of state under a government headed by an Englishman, Clement Attlee, and by a party founded by a Scot, Keir Hardie.
Joyce Quin
Labour, House of Lords

• Suzanne Moore (Comment, 26 August) says the English response to the debate is one of envy. I am British. I was a British public servant for 26 years and I am angry.

Angry that I (and many others) am not allowed to vote on the future of my country. Angry that Salmond is creating hopes that will not take no for an answer. Angry that the yes group is claiming to protect the NHS that was founded by a British government. And angry that UK governments, over the years, have failed, by their self-preserving short-termism, to tackle the West Lothian question. This is at the core of the public perception that politics is irrelevant.

Whatever happens in September, next May we should demand parties that have a long-term view of the future of this nation – “long-term” meaning for the next generation (at least) and not just about pacifying the SNP or Ukip or whoever else is around by then.
Andrew Martin
Swindon

• Val McDermid stigmatises as “fearties” those who doubt the wisdom of Scottish independence (Comment, 22 August). This playground taunt is not uncommon in Scotland today. Its near relative is the charge that those who do not want independence have a psychological flaw – “the Scottish cringe” – allegedly induced by centuries of alleged English domination. Both are attempts to poison the wells of debate, and discredit those opposed to independence irrespective of the arguments they may offer. On the other side devotees are urged to trust all to Scotland somewhat as the religious are supposed to trust all to the Lord. Perhaps such attitudes are only to be expected when no one really has the capacity to master all the relevant information and make a fully informed judgment.
Paul Brownsey
Glasgow

• As an Englishman, my desire for the union to continue is based on my feeling British and the belief that together we can build something finer than if we split apart; but looking around the world, I am also frightened about the future. No one knows what political and economic storms may lie ahead; we should hope for the best but prepare for the worst, and I for one will feel safer if Scotland remains part of us. Giving in to fear is cowardice, but not listening to it is foolishness.
Joe Morison
London

• Sir Tom Hunter said: “Whatever the people decide we’ll just get on with it” (Report, 20 August). And the “we” Scotland’s first billionaire is referring to is really the few who own the country. “That’s democracy,” he concedes, generously. In fact it is the opposite, but he neatly exposes the irrelevance of the referendum and the sham that is democracy within capitalism.
Brian Gardner
Glasgow branch, Socialist party of Great Britain

With reference to your editorial (Pope Francis and liberation theology: Second coming, 25 August), the decision to put in process the beatification of Oscar Romero is considered by many to be overdue. I suspect, however, that in many ways Romero would echo the sentiment of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker: “Don’t call me a saint. I do not want to be dismissed so easily.”

In 1988 during the so-called dirty war, I visited El Salvador for the first time. Back then Romero’s tomb was at the door of the incomplete cathedral in San Salvador. It was a place of pilgrimage for the “poor church for the poor” seeking inspiration, courage and comfort.

Out in the barrios, catechists and animators nurtured a new kind of Christianity founded on belief in the humanity of God, a reading of the Bible from the perspective of the poor, and a commitment to solidarity.

Returning a couple of years ago, I found that Romero’s tomb now resides in the basement of the cathedral. No longer do the crowds flock with their concerns. By and large, the animators and catechists – as well as the theology they espoused – have been marginalised and discredited.

The true saints are those who continue to strive, against the odds, for the foundation of civil society marked by biblical accompaniment, human rights, historical memory and the martyrs.

If there is to be any kind of “second coming” as a result of the decision to beatify Oscar Romero, it is the “poor church of the poor” that will need to be rehabilitated, together with the methodology and spirit that once offered the hope of true liberation.
Rt Rev Peter B Price
Gillingham, Dorset

• Liberation theology cannot be picked up from South America and planted in the UK. But its method of doing theology – from the perspective of the poor, studying the facts and being shocked by their circumstances – can be. Leonardo Boff, silenced by the Vatican in 1992, wrote: “The central question is how to exercise faith in the midst of social oppression. How should the ecclesiastical community interact with the political community?”

The short answer to Boff’s question (posed in an essay, The Originality of Liberation Theology, in The Future Of Liberation Theology: Essays In Honour of Gustavo Gutiérrez, published in 1989) is with and for poor people who suffer innocently. That is done out of the love inspired by the innocent suffering of our founder, who joined them on a cross.

Our first-world churches are complicit with extreme free-market politics and do not reflect, in the light of our faith, on the oppression done in the name of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Our ineffectiveness can be measured by the increasing oppression of the poorest citizens in the UK.

We desperately need bishops and archbishops who will interact with the political community and the public in the manner of Oscar Romero. He famously said: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist. When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.” Romero was assassinated on 24 March 1980, the eve of the enthronement of Robert Runcie as archbishop of Canterbury.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty

Arms are the real problem

How could anyone suggest, as Timothy Garton Ash does, that only by working with the US can the problems of the Middle East be solved (8 August)? The US is mainly the cause of the problems; everywhere it interferes, it leaves bedlam behind. Iraq was livable before the invasion; now there is chaos. Of course, the US administration may have had good intentions but the American companies that it employs – Halliburton, Blackwater, KBR – are only in there for the money.

Part of the problem is that three major recipients of aid from the US are Israel, Egypt and Colombia, and much of that assistance is in the form of arms, so as a result innocent people are being killed and nothing is being done. We know the story in Gaza, but in Egypt the democratically elected government was overthrown with the aid of US arms, and in Colombia it’s the same story as rightwing paramilitaries enforce a reign of terror on defenceless victims and it is condoned by the present government, which is supported by the US and Britain.

So what’s the solution? No more arms. Let the money be put into something much more useful and long-lasting: infrastructure, education, hospitals, long-term employment projects and general development and wellbeing.
Gemma Hensey
Westport, Ireland

• I am intrigued by Timothy Garton Ash’s statement “not moral, because Europeans, of all people, should never be silent while war crimes are being committed”. As he doesn’t supply any reason for the comment, I’m left to wonder whether he means that Europeans have higher moral standards than others, or that Europeans have committed so many egregiously immoral war crimes.
Deborah Yaffe
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

We must solve inequality

Perhaps it’s time to update Karl Marx: rather than simply “the opiate of the masses”, religion has today taken on the additional role of an aphrodisiac for those consumed by the lust for power. As Jonathan Freedland reminds us in your lead story of 15 August, today’s jihadi frequently has an educated background, possibly a Harvard MBA, together with the backing of the global superpowers, the primary source of his weaponry as well as his grudges.

As always, the underlying issue in most if not all such conflicts is inequality. However sincere Barack Obama and the few enlightened world leaders may be in their attempts to tackle this problem, they are hamstrung by the short-term goals of the real power-brokers: the arms manufacturers and their military supporters, the financiers and the oil barons as well as the multinationals, whose profitability is based on feeding their willing market with fear, envy and greed, all in the name of globalisation.

Their specious credo is that only by encouraging developing countries to emulate the level of unsustainable consumption and waste enjoyed by the developed world can global equity be achieved, as George Monbiot points out in the same issue of Guardian Weekly. I fear that only the imminent collapse of the global house of cards will allow the restoration of sanity and sustainability so desperately sought by us “deviants”, to use Monbiot’s terminology. Be proud of your deviancy, but first be very, very afraid.
Noel Bird
Boreen Point, Queensland, Australia

Neoliberalism is a con

George Monbiot is right: neoliberalism is a self-serving con (15 August). In New Zealand, too, we’re beginning to see the light with the publication of four books in the last year outlining the damage that this self-serving doctrine has wreaked on our once egalitarian society.

We might have been the first to set up a welfare system after the Great Depression, but we were also among the first to adopt the so-called free market neoliberal policies trumpeted by Reagan and Thatcher. This we did to extremes that astonished even the authors of those policies.

Thirty years later, after subsequent rightwing governments restricted workers’ rights, cut welfare benefits and bolstered the private sector at the expense of the public, the features of this disaster are clear. More than 200,000 of New Zealand children live in such poverty that many often go to school hungry. Free bottles of milk are now given out at morning tea in most schools. We are the seventh most unequal country in the OECD. Inequality is associated with crime: we have the second-highest rate of imprisonment in the OECD.

Fortunately a groundswell of revolt has emerged among thinking people who have contributed searching analyses of where and how this failed mantra went wrong. The most recent of these books is Beyond the Free Market: Rebuilding a Just Society in New Zealand. In its foreword, former high court judge Sir Edmund Thomas declares that the neoliberal revolution was an appalling mistake.
Pat Baskett
Auckland, New Zealand

Myths of privatisation

I commend Ha-Joon Chang for pointing out, in Privatised UK is far from perfect (8 August), some of the examples that give the lie to the myth that government enterprises are inherently less efficient than those run by private enterprise.

Another myth that needs exposure is that right-leaning governments make better financial managers than those less so inclined. When a rightwing government privatises – ie sells off – assets, the proceeds of the sale are accounted as revenue, thereby increasing that government’s surplus or reducing its deficit. Similarly, when a nationalising government purchases an enterprise, the transaction is treated as a cost, making privatisers appear to be better managers than nationalisers. In neither case has the effect of the transaction upon the national balance sheet been accounted for.

When a political party claims that private enterprise is more efficient than public ownership, it is really just admitting that it finds public ownership too difficult, and indeed it is almost axiomatic that it should find it so – running public utilities and other national enterprises involves not only budgetary outcomes but also the effectiveness of the service provided, to say nothing of the longer-term stability of the society it serves. This is a far more complex matter than the running of a business, in which the bottom line is all that matters.

Political parties of almost all colours have recently increased privatisation; in many cases this is a symptom of their incompetence.
David Barker
Bunbury, Western Australia

Swimming in the nude

To Daniel Start’s question, what can one do to avoid offence when swimming without clothes (8 August), I would reply – take a holiday in Germany. Especially in the former East, the culture of swimming and sunbathing in the buff remains strong, and there is nothing like the sense of prudish outrage that regularly seems to accompany sporadic displays of naked flesh in Britain and many other parts of the world.

Never a fan of nudism myself, since moving here three years ago I have developed the habit of naked swimming after morning runs. My favourite swimming lake is in the middle of the city and even in the early morning there is usually quite a lot of naked traffic. On sunny days dozens of naturists populate the lawns while foreign tourists walk by and everybody else just goes about their business.

Stephen Gough, the naked rambler, may be interested to hear that in some areas of Germany, for instance in the Harz mountains, naked hiking is actively encouraged to promote tourism, and even outside those areas his antics would be unlikely to be met with much interest from the authorities. For anyone eager to throw off his textiles – this is the place to be!
Stephan Quentin
Potsdam, Germany

Law in Hong Kong

Anson Chan may wish to consider international law in her fight for democracy in Hong Kong (22 August). Since the Hong Kong basic legal agreement is signed by Britain, China and Hong Kong, British law must surely come in. If that is not the case, then British accession to various UN treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights opens another way for international law to operate. In 1997 the Chinese government informed the UN that “the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as applied to Hong Kong shall remain in force beginning from 1 July 1997”.

Some even think these covenants make nuclear weapons and even guns illegal. That is, that citizens have the right to peaceful enjoyment of their environment and not to be blasted to smithereens.
Paul Knobel
Auckland, New Zealand

Briefly

• I might have enjoyed Rupert Myers’s article on running (15 August) if I had been able to make it past his errors. Pheidippides ran to Sparta before the battle of Marathon seeking help. After the battle he ran to Athens to report the victory. It is this second journey that is honoured by the name and race. He certainly didn’t practise “relentless, tiresome bragging about the achievement” because “as any fule kno”, having reported the victory, he died.
Andrew Lacey
Mold, UK

Please send lett

Bad-tempered TV arguments do not provide critical Scots with the decisive data

Sir, I am a young Scot, and I am tired of this Yes/No stuff as both sides play headline-grabbing politics. I care for Scotland’s future and I am annoyed when important long-term issues are dismissed with a quick meaningless statement. I want solid facts to decide on, rather than promises and personalities.

Gordon Mackie

Glasgow

Sir, Alistair Darling’s lacklustre performance underlines the need for the No campaign to deploy Gordon Brown, Jim Murphy and George Galloway against Alex Salmond. These three have passion and are not afraid to talk positively about Britishness and shared values. They also engage with the effect that breaking up the UK would have on Europe and the world. Darling never seems to get beyond the pound and oil. The Yes campaign has been allowed to occupy the moral high ground for too long — we need some fiery preachy types rather than an accountant to challenge it.

The Rev Dr Ian Bradley

St Andrews, Fife

Sir, In the recent TV clash Alistair Darling seemed to handle himself well enough but Mr Salmond never seems to have any real facts, figures or answers to key questions. His rudeness, continuing to talk over his opponent, must be embarrassing for many Yes voters.

Emilie Lamplough

Trowbridge, Wilts

Sir, I am surprised that there has been so little reference in the No campaign to the family ties within the UK. I am English and living in England, but I am married to a Scot. My children are half Scottish and my grandchildren a quarter Scottish. There must be millions of people on both sides of the border who are dismayed at the prospect of the other side becoming foreign.

Tim Capon

Motcombe, Dorset

Sir, Westminster and our political leaders seem to be doing nothing to actively preserve our union. In September it could be ended without any say from its members (including those of Scottish ancestry) outside Scotland.

Philip Beddows

Munslow, Shropshire

Sir, Last night we saw a spectacle more suited to a bar-room shouting match than a serious debate on the future of our two countries. The most concerning aspect of the evening was the lack of any academic rigour around the arguments on both sides which often seemed to descend into cheap point-scoring by both participants amid a proliferation of numbers and statistics completely unverifiable by the average viewer.

Dennis Lock

Watford, Herts

Sir, The potential ramifications of a Yes vote in the referendum are far too serious to be influenced by this sorry spectacle, where mere posturing took the place of substance.

Politicians of all parties are doing us a huge disservice in the run-up to the referendum. Is there no person of substance, in Scotland, prepared to spell out, in simple terms, the real dangers of full independence? The SNP and its supporters must understand that there is no pot of gold at the end of their rainbow.

Bravery overshadows any technical priority disputes about Victoria Cross winners

Sir, Maurice French (letter, Aug 25) and you (report, Aug 25) are both right. Francis Grenfell, my great-uncle, was technically the first VC. The award was not officially made until it was published in the London Gazette, or gazetted. Francis’s award was the first to be gazetted. However, the occasion which gave rise to the award took place the day after Dease’s.

Bravery, however, does not need such distinctions.

Michael Grenfell

Westcot, Oxon

Gladstone’s foreign policy may contain a lesson for us today in dealing with Islamic extremists

Sir, Paul Marshall (Aug 25) overlooks the glaring calamity of Gladstone’s “moral foreign policy” — its failure to prevent the establishment of a militant fundamentalist Islamic state that ruled a million square miles of Africa for 13 years. The Sudanese Mahadiya was made possible by Gladstone’s not intervening in 1884 in support of General Gordon, only sending the famous Khartoum Relief Expedition, which was too little too late. The Mahadiya was then left alone by the British for more than a decade, fighting a series of savage jihads against all neighbouring states including Christian Ethiopia and even the Belgian Congo. It was only when the French threatened to establish themselves on the Nile in the late 1890s that Kitchener finally went in to eradicate Sudan’s Islamic theocracy using massively disproportionate military force at Omdurman, known to Africans as the Battle of Karari.

There may well be a topically relevant lesson from history somewhere in there.

Ralph Lloyd-Jones

Nottingham

The death of Lord Attenborough throws open the question of the city’s most famous scions

Sir, Oliver Kamm tells us that David Attenborough is now unrivalled as the most distinguished living Leicesterian (Aug 26). Leaving aside that Sir David was born in London, is Gary Lineker no longer with us?

Frank Greaney

Formby, Liverpool

Memories from the son of the man who painted the Sistine ceiling for The Agony and the Ecstasy

Sir, You said that the Sistine chapel ceiling in a Worthing church is the only full size copy in the world (Aug 23), and a very fine achievement it is too. However, if you cast your mind back to the film The Agony and The Ecstasy, starring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo, you will see the ceiling being painted by my father, Ferdinand Bellan, one of the greatest film scenic artists. I think that reproduction was sold to a private buyer as a complete work of art, to be re-assembled elsewhere.

Peter Bellan

St Davids

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2. ent»

3. Letters

A defaced poster displaying the ‘No Thanks’ slogan Photo: William Page

SIR – I am persuaded to write, having just driven from Perth to Dundee. Rightly, there are prominent signs for both Yes and No campaigns. It is worrying that, whereas not one Yes notice is damaged, the majority of those supporting Better Together have sadly been vandalised.

This indicates to me that some supporters of the Yes campaign either do not have confidence in their policies or that those responsible really have decided that, with less than three weeks to go, intimidation is the only way that they can win.

Mike Beale
Bridge of Earn, Perthshire

SIR – The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which are not part of the United Kingdom, are able to use the pound as their currency, so why is Scotland not allowed the same privilege?

I speak as an Englishman who is ashamed of my country’s bullying tactics.

Kevin Cottrell
Buckland, Oxfordshire

SIR – The Scottish share of the UK national debt would be nothing like as small as the £143 billion that the National Institute of Economic and Social Research suggests (Business, August 25). It ignores the public sector pension liability of £1,000 billion, the old age pensions liability of another £1,000 billion and several trillion more besides.

At least with independence the Scots might know what their debts really are.

Brian Gilbert
Hampton, Middlesex

SIR – I have seen little reference to the defence of the (new) Scottish realm apart from clearing the Royal Navy out of Faslane.

Since 1949 the Western nations have enjoyed the shield of the “collective security” policy of the Nato nations. Will the new Scotland be committing its forces to Nato? The Scottish regiments, maybe, but what about the Scottish navy and the Scottish air force? I am reminded of the French exit from Nato’s integrated military structure in the Sixties, when it chose to enjoy the protection of collective security without having to pay the full subscription.

Robert Price
Malton, North Yorkshire

SIR – Current BBC weather forecasts completely ignore the existence of the Irish Republic. If Scotland votes to leave the Union, will the BBC stop broadcasting weather forecasts for Scotland?

Eric Clark
Woburn Sands, Buckinghamshire

SIR – There appear to be three questions that nobody is bringing up.

1 In the event of a Yes vote, will there ever be another referendum?

2 In the event of a No vote, when will the next referendum take place?

3 Do all British citizens living in Scotland on a given date lose their British citizenship?

Robert Pugh
Carmarthen