One notable house you omitted to mention in your editorial on writers’ abodes (18 August) is Newstead Abbey, the splendid gothic ancestral home of the greatest of the romantic poets, Lord Byron. Although subject to some later Victorian renovation, it remains “embosomed in a happy valley” where “Through thy battlements … the hollow winds whistle”.
Michael Wild
Princetown, Devon
• Towards the end of an evening dancing at Wolverhampton Civic Hall in the 1960s, any couple closer than a chaste ballroom-dancing hold would be tapped on the shoulder by a man in the middle, guarding our morals (Letters, 19 August).
Jennifer Macwhinnie
London
