Dear Sir

‘If you can read this, thank a teacher’ runs the admirably blunt message thought up for car-window stickers by one of the teachers' unions. Perhaps you would allow me space to put a variant of this.

Janet Sayers, in her warm review (Vol. 6(4), ) of Jocasta's Children, writes: ‘How welcome is this long overdue translation’. Well, I feel bound to say, thank or at any rate acknowledge a translator; and for preference the translator.

That ‘long overdue’ tweaks another nerve: it took me more than three years to persuade an English publisher that a translation of Christiane Olivier's hugely successful Les Enfants de Jocaste was a project worth backing.

Yours ruefully

George Craig