Impeccably sourced ingredients litter an inventive menu that includes biodynamic risotto with pine mushrooms and meat jus scented with coffee and parmesan, local abalone Meuni?-style with shallots braised with pig’s trotter, and black seabass on the plancha with butterbeans and wild fennel.Price per head: Manresa: Tasting menu $150 (£86).Book ahead: Three weeksAddress: 320 Village Lane, Los Gatos, California (001 408 354 4330; manresa restaurant ).Can’t get in? Try the elegant French cuisine of chef Roland Passot at San Francisco’s recently remodelled La Folie (001 415 776 5577. The best in the Big Apple: Keller knows his onions Having been hailed America’s best chef for French Laundry, Thomas Keller tried his luck with Per Se The three menus change daily. His salmon and cr? fraiche ice-cream cones, slow-cooked butter-poached lobster, oysters, tapioca and oscietra caviar have earned him three Michelin stars. Price per head is $210 (£120) (00 1 212 823 9335; perseny ).Can’t get in? Try Masa, the nearby Japanese restaurant, (00 1 212 823 9800). The best of British at Bray: Guaranteed gastro gasps One thing is certain: you won’t be bored at The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal’s three-starred temple to molecular gastronomy in Bray, Berkshire. From the puffball of lime and green tea mousse poached in liquid nitrogen, snail porridge, sardine on toast jelly and roast foie gras with almond gel to the leather, oak and tobacco chocolates, this is edge-of-your-seat dining.

Price per head for a three-course menu is £67.75(01628 580333; fatduck.co.uk) Can’t get in? Try The Hinds Head (01628 626151).. 502 Proxy Error

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Reason: Error reading from remote server. Taking a holiday in one of the world’s culinary hot-spots sets up a tricky dynamic.

While it is undoubtedly good for the palate, the spirit, the tastebuds and the soul, a vacation that centres on the consumption of food and drink can have unfortunate consequences for the figure. Consuming in moderation would be one solution, but that’s easier said than done when faced with regional temptations such as tagliatelle with pumpkin and truffles, spiced wild rabbit, Tuscan lemon sorbet and first-rate bottles of Madeira. It is disappointed that the DTI has failed to look at an outright ban.”The danger is that these cheques – pushed without any clear advice – are usually treated as a cash advance. “I just hope it is going to be well received.”Consumer body Which? has campaigned against the cheques and says the consultation does not go far enough.

Look at the Elys?s catalogue (reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow 2005 – 2025, Thames & Hudson £18.95) and you’ll see the work of a young American, Ted Partin. At first glance, Partin looks like Nan Goldin: actually, his MTV-generation shots are about as far from Goldin’s as it is possible to be. Posed, complicitous, made with a large-format camera, they say to the viewer: everything I’m showing you is a lie; the image, the medium; the world.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for this self-doubt, then point a shaking finger at Wolfgang Tillmans. Tillmans’s book, truth study center (Taschen £14.99), is a thing of beauty, its images (Shay III, Device Control) at times mistakeable for functional photography: documentary shots, say, or travel pictures.

The point of Tillmans, though, is precisely that his work does not have a function. It is storyless, evanescent, self-referential – in a word, art.Where all trainee photographers once wanted to work for news agencies, they now want to be artists: by the far the largest number of submissions to reGeneration were art photographs. Susan Bright’s Art Photography Now (Thames & Hudson £29.95) suggests why. Looking at the work of household names like Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr and Tillmans, Bright’s book hints at just how much photography has come to hog the contemporary art scene.

Given this success, it’s ironic that the art photograph – blamed since the 1850s for the death of painting – now seems likely to wipe out the likes of Doisneau as well.One painter who would not have crowed at this twist was Francis Bacon. It’s widely known that Bacon’s work owes a debt to photography, though just how large a debt is described by Martin Harrison’s excellent In Camera: Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson, £35). Although lacking images from the Joule archive, Harrison’s book traces Bacon’s descent from Muybridge and Eisenstein and his obsession with what Harrison calls “working documents”: photographs torn from books and magazines and overscored with paint. Bacon, like Monet, saw that photography had changed the way we see; as Walter Benjamin noted, the reproduction of a Vel?uez is not the same thing as a Vel?uez. A child of his time and a devout Benjaminian, Bacon liked to work from photographs of paintings, not from paintings.But would he have worked from Tillmans? I doubt it: Bacon’s taste was for photography with muscle – newspaper shots, reproductions in art books, illustrations from anatomy manuals. So you can imagine his eye being caught by two of this year’s most intriguing monographs, both of work by men from the last pre-art-school generation of photographers, both unjustly lesser-known.Willy Ronis (Taschen £14.99) covers the career of the 95-year-old Frenchman whose images of Paris – to my mind, rawer than Brassa? or Doisneau’s – sum up the city’s malnourished chic in the years after the Second World War.

Far from it; think of it as a pragmatic way to work up an appetite. Being in the Liguria region of Italy or in California’s Napa Valley and not being hungry or thirsty doesn’t bear thinking about.There are at least two ways to take this type of holiday. The more expensive is to book with one of a growing number of companies at the top end of the market offering tailored breaks for active foodies. The alter-native is to travel to a specific region known for its food, its sport or both, and book your own supplementary activities.Active Gourmet Holidays is an example of the former. The only sensible approach for those who like to give their appetite free reign is to take a holiday that combines both a significant quantity (and quality) of calories with some perspicacious physical endeavour.
Not that your correspondent is recommending an earnest, health-conscious approach.

The soup section in Wild Flavours (Cassell Illustrated £20) suggests the following for your vacuum flask: “Pigeon shooting in a bitterly cold wood in February is always Pea and Ham, whereas rough shooting among the brambles in December is by necessity French Onion.” To be fair, there’s more to the book than game.. but you get the idea. Meat fans
Chef Mike Robinson, like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, likes to catch his own ingredients. At least this means that there are plenty to choose from when it comes to buying presents, so here are some of the best recent examples, divided into some popular types of recipient as a small service to make your Christmas shopping easier. One thing’s for sure, there’s no shortage of cookbooks this season Amazon.co uk shows 30 to 40 new titles for October alone.

A word of warning, though: don’t sneak this out of your loved one’s stocking on Christmas Eve while you contemplate the gory and hollow interior of your turkey It’s not that kind of stuffing. To buy any of the books featured with free p&p, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897 and quote IBD12/05 10% discount on all orders over £20. And that leads us effortlessly onto my top recommendation, which is Sam Leith’s Dead Pets (Canongate £9.99) which, apart from being very funny, is also terribly moving in its exploration of our relationships with companion animals and how we cope when our dumb chums move onto the Happier Hunting Ground. It’s also (as a nice change) very well written – see if you notice the repeated allusions to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 – and, particularly useful at this time of year, has a lengthy section on stuffing. By the same token, normally I’d abjure Why Did Ars? Wenger Cross the Road? (Bantam £9.99), as it’s a football joke book, and if we’re going to ban golf, then why not football? However, the jokes are so good that even if you hate football (like me) you should be able to adapt something like the following to suit any circumstance: Why does it take two Everton fans to eat a hedgehog? One to do the eating, the other to watch out for traffic. Chris Riddell’s The Da Vinci Cod (Walker Books £5.99) is a delightful little book of excruciatingly bad literary puns, drawn with Riddell’s familiar flair for beautifully wrought detail, and no home should really be without the great Ronald Searle’s Searle’s Cats in a new and revised edition (Souvenir Press £9.99).

A Shit History of Nearly Everything by A Parody (ho ho) (Michael O’Mara £9.99) sounds like it should be equally cloacally empowering, but isn’t. It’s not even a parody, but just another sub-Schott bit of band-wagon jumping. Which isn’t to say that the ubiquitous Schott hasn’t led by example up some rewarding byways. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo (Penguin £10) is a collection/dictionary/glossary (that it’s indefinable is one of its many strengths) of words from around the world which have bizarrely exact meanings.

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response from an upstream server.. My friend Rosaria lives on the fourth floor of a narrow, busy street in the heart of Naples. There’s no lift up to her flat and she’s not as young as she used to be. So whenever she needs a few things from the greengrocer or a freshly baked roll for her morning caffe latte, she steps out on to the balcony overlooking the street and calls down in a piercing, musical voice to one of the shop assistants on the pavement below.

They serve only one dish, called Cha ca, which is fish marinated with ginger, chilli and dill.Gear for souvenirs:Make time to visit the antique shops that are scattered around the country. Look out for the beautiful blue and white porcelain bowls and silver chop sticks from Vietnam’s imperial past These make great souvenirs.. You’ll discover, as you travel farther south the climate becomes more tropical. You’ll also find that the food tastes hotter too, more peppery and spicy.One singular sensation:One restaurant you mustn’t miss in Hanoi is Cha ca la Vong, 14 Cha ca Street (00 84 4 825 3929).

It is 135 years old and is owned by the family that set it up. So don’t be surprised to come across one side of a street that is solely selling, say, bamboo ladders or poles, while another is the place to buy yourself a candle or a coffin.Read the book:Before you go, buy a copy of Graham Greene’s ‘The Quiet American’, which paints a picture of the early days of US involvement in Vietnam. It may have been published 50 years ago, but it still evokes the sights and sounds of this country.To market, to market:Ben Thanh market is a must if you’re visiting Ho Chi Minh City. You can buy everything from a pair of sandals to a jade ring, a bicycle inner tube to freshly ground spices. Produce, flowers and meats are sold on the sidewalks roundabout.Everybody’s chewing it:Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is often referred to as the belly of Vietnam, while the capital, Hanoi, in the north, is said to be the head. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter where you travel to in this country, because everybody is obsessed with food.It’s hotter down south:Most people who travel to Vietnam try to take in as much of the country as possible. Just point to the fresh food you want and ask for it to be cooked to order – you don’t have to be an expert in the Vietnamese language to eat with the locals.Buy buy buy, sell sell sell:In the old town of Hanoi, the street names correspond to particular trades.

‘Exploring Taste and Flavour’ by Tom Kime is published by Kyle Cathie (£19.99) A foodie’s guide to Vietnam The fresher the better:When you are eating street food in Vietnam, always head for the stalls that are busy. That is unless you are presenting a programme on street food and at every corner you have to begin eating on camera again. One day I had to eat about 15 different meals.Tom Kime is the consultant chef at Taste at the Fortina Spa Resort in Malta (00 356 2346 0000; hotelfortina ). Hail a vendor and order noodles wherever you are, day or night They are cooked for you and then the vendor moves on This is the best way to eat when you are travelling. I often remember with fondness that time in the kitchen with Tow and her husband, away from the urban sprawl of Ho Chi Minh City. My top fast food Much of the street food is carried in bamboo baskets suspended from wooden yolks on the shoulders of the vendors. These baskets carry fruit and vegetables or a small charcoal stove where tea is brewed or soup heated – this really is fast food.

When you have added all your condiments, just stir your bowl from the bottom to combine your flavours. You don’t have to be a chef to create a culinary masterpiece in this country. My top sight One of the most extraordinary experience of my travels through Vietnam this time was a visit to the Cu Chi tunnels, where the Vietcong hid, lived and fought against the Americans. There, in the dark narrow passages, the Tet offensive was planned. It was eerie underground, but it was fascinating to see how all that food was cooked down there for the thousands of Vietcong troops.

The opulence of his suffering goes beyond anything imagined by Puccini, Strauss or Janacek. The character of Billy shares the blithe, passive beauty of Snow White and the exquisite martyrdom of an early saint. Whether Melville intended his story to be a metaphor for suppressed sexuality or not, Britten’s voyeuristic tragedy is as far out of the closet as you can get without having packed up the closet and taken it down to the Salvation Army. With its luxuriant undertow of homo-eroticism, its brutal sadism, its all-male cast, and, in designer Brian Thomson’s hydraulic abstraction of HMS Indomitable, its giant Meccano set, Billy Budd is a boys-only opera. Yet still the shows go on, some of them – such as Neil Armfield’s 1998 Opera Australia/Welsh National Opera production of Billy Budd – very good indeed. For those who came late to opera, the Stevie Smith-style resignation of artistic director Sean Doran is but the latest disaster in what has been a dismal half-decade for an organisation whose anthropophagy is rivalled only by the Conservative Party. As ill as he’d been, his death still came as a sickening shock.

Kevin Coyne had been so strong for so long that we’d come to believe that voice would never go away; we thought it would go on singing for ever. And in a way – through Underground – it does.’Underground’ costs £11 from www.kevincoyne.de. Like pea-soupers, probity and politeness, the “powerhouse” era at English National Opera has acquired the patina of ancient history. She is the love of my life.”That night he kept working at a macabre picture which showed the prone body of a man with a second, sinister figure peering over him. Unusually for Coyne, he couldn’t finish it.At 5.30am on 2 December, his wife woke up.”He was standing in the room,” Helmi told me, “and he said, quite calmly: ‘I think I am going to die now.’ For a moment I thought it was one of his jokes I put my arms around him He seemed to fall asleep again I was dozing When I woke up he was smiling but his eyes were closed I didn’t need to call a doctor. I knew.”I was in Zimbabwe when Helmi called to say her husband had died.

From the earliest days in film history, parents and teachers were alarmed at how much time kids were spending in the dark watching the flickers. In 1973, The Exorcist was – for adults – one of the most disturbing films ever shown. There were reasonable anxieties that some tender teenagers in the audience might be endangered – and this is all the more possible in that the central victim is a child. But when the film was reissued a few years ago I took an 11-year-old son and the only thing that interested him was how they had got the girl’s head to revolve. One problem for the new King Kong is going to be the wise child’s response to Anne’s alarm: “Gee, hasn’t she seen King Kong before?” In other words, our children have become very hip. The film-makers reckoned that the dynamic emotional thrust of the story was FEAR! That’s why Anne Darrow the ing?e actress is first taught to scream the movie way and then allowed to scream for real as she sees a beast beyond her imagining. It was always the credo of Chaplin that he appealed to the child in every grown person, and to this day you can introduce a 10-year-old to classic movie fun by showing them Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers.

However, try W C Fields, and you discover the extra, embittered maturity in Fields – which went with the alleged liking for children, if boiled or roasted. Horror and crime pictures were the only genres of the Thirties outside child’s territory – and King Kong in 1933 was regarded as a kind of horror picture. In hindsight, one can see how easily the set genres of that age appealed to everyone: action and adventure films, without undue violence; romantic stories, without too much sex; musicals – “Everyone loves a musical!”; and, of course, comedies. That ” golden age” atmosphere is part of the opportunity seized upon by the film industry to reach “everyone” at the same time. In turn, that was a measure of an age when families without the means to afford baby-sitting services liked to go, all together, to see movies. Those packed houses for The Lord of the Rings were a throwback to the days when families went to mainstream films together, fairly sure that young children could follow the plot without being unduly frightened.

One large reason why Jackson was personally paid $20m to do this Kong was because in The Lord of the Rings – full of dread, combat and potential horror (to say nothing of complex mystical urgings) – he delivered a film that children, parents and grandparents saw together, happily, congratulating each other on what is now a very rare thing – a family entertainment. There’s an odd contradiction of forces at work: older generations may long for tranquil “children’s films” – thus the return of Lassie in a new version this week to divert the little ones from video games that may entail hours of questing, zapping and destroying Yet kids also long for a taste of the grown-up world. The new Harry Potter picture has moments that are flat-out scary and intimations of adolescence blooming in our central trio. The bringing to the screen of the Narnia story is an attempt to hold on to the child audience while keeping adults interested. And some of it will work, even if sometimes kids can only prove themselves through rebellion. A little fright is OK, but the creative vision will have been tempered to the box office. We may never hear the details, but if Jackson left elements of authentic terror or adult sexual suggestiveness in his film, those will have been drained away to get the 12A rating.

Benitez’s comments diverted attention from his team’s third successive League game without a win and they travel to Charlton without the suspended Reina and also Steven Gerrard, who suffered a knee injury in the 2-0 defeat at Chelsea.Gerrard was sent for a scan on Monday and, though it revealed no serious damage, the Liverpool captain will miss tonight’s game and possibly Saturday’s trip to Wigan.. A player should only be thinking about staying fit and winning the World Cup, but if a manager says he wants five in attack and you know he’s not going to be around in another two weeks and you want to play in defence, then you play in defence. His successes in La Liga, the Uefa Cup and the Champions’ League have all been built on a fierce team ethic – he resigned at Valencia over a long-running dispute with the club’s technical director and has resisted advances to return to Real Madrid because of the firm support he receives in the Anfield boardroom. Now that Eriksson’s relationship with the FA has fractured, Benitez believes he cannot expect the same level of commitment from his players.The Spaniard added: “If players know the manager is going and someone else is coming in then they start to think about other things. “What do you want? To have a new manager in place or to win the World Cup with the manager you have now? If you support your manager you can win the World Cup, then afterwards there is time to change, but to be successful you must have the support of everyone.”Benitez’s concerns for Eriksson are based on past experience. It is a big surprise for me and it shows no respect for the current manager,” insisted the Liverpool manager.

Yet the man who landed the job and spent almost 20 years working within the media circus that is Real Madrid is astonished at the Football Association’s decision to announce Eriksson’s departure and commence the search for his successor so close to the World Cup, and at the jockeying for position among his Premiership rivals to become the Swede’s replacement.
It is a situation that Benitez claimed, would not occur even in his spirited homeland and he warned that it will weaken players’ focus and discipline during the most important tournament of their lives.”So many people are talking about different managers. The Spaniard became the latest high-profile Premiership figure to join the debate on Sven Goran Eriksson’s succession as England manager yesterday but, in stark contrast to his peers, spoke only to voice concern at a campaign he believes has undermined the nation’s prospects of success at this summer’s World Cup. Alan Curbishley’s credentials as the next England manager will be inevitably enhanced if Charlton overcome the reigning European champions in tonight’s rearranged Premiership fixture and Benitez was generous in his praise for Liverpool’s second choice to replace G?rd Houllier as manager in 2004. Rafael Benitez will be aghast if Liverpool are defeated at The Valley tonight, and not merely as a consequence of his failure to record only a second Premiership win of 2006. I haven’t read the comments, but obviously I’ve heard, and it disappoints me.”McClaren also dismissed reports that the Dutch midfielder Boateng has signed a new four-and-a-half-year deal worth £10.5m and that there had been unrest in the dressing-room as a result.Although McClaren admitted that talks were close to a conclusion, he insisted that the contract would be worth nowhere near that amount, and that whatever the figures involved, the rest of the squad would be delighted to see him put pen to paper.. “We brought him in from Manchester United reserves and gave him an opportunity in the Premier League. He did very well and was always a great lad around the place, a great pro to work with, a delight, a nice lad.

We have got players coming back, but while they are, the rest of us have to stand up and take responsibility, be big enough to accept that we are in a professional game and we have to act like professionals and get on with it.”McClaren has not been aided by reported comments from the former Boro midfielder Jonathan Greening, suggesting widespread unrest in the dressing-room.”It disappoints me because Jonathan Greening was, I thought, a very good football player for this club,” he said. “We are doing the same things we have always done for the last four and a half years, that I have always done in my coaching career.”We are working on the basics and working damn hard on that training field to put things right, and we will keep doing that until we turn it around We have to. I have to take responsibility, but I have to be positive, I have to be optimistic, and I see the likes of [George] Boateng and [James] Morrison and [Chris] Riggott and [Franck] Queudrue and [Fabio] Rochemback, five players we didn’t have last week, and I see them training this week.”It lifts the gloom and it gives you hope. However, he insists he will not allow the criticism to get to him.”I don’t read a newspaper at these times and I try not to let it affect me, because you can’t,” he said. “They were my first four games in management and I lost them all, and I was wondering myself whether I was pointless and clueless. But since then, I’ve had many more experiences, good and bad.

I know that eventually, as they say, the sun will shine again and there will be better days.”Everybody goes through this, it’s how you come through it,” he insisted. “I’m determined to come through it, I’m determined to fight my way through it, I’m determined to bring the players with me and fight anybody until we do.”It is only a matter of weeks since McClaren was being regarded as one of the favourites to succeed Sven Goran Eriksson as England coach after this summer’s World Cup finals.But ironic chants of “McClaren for England” from his own club’s fans during the Villa game are a measure of how far his stock has fallen since. “What we have achieved is a great success,” said Cudicini, who cancelled a flying lesson to attend the launch of Chelsea’s Centenary DVD this week.”We are in a very good position but we are not finished yet. Retaining the title is not easy but this season we have been very focused on repeating last season’s success The FA Cup is very important for us.

As it had previously been a warehouse, it took a long time to renovate. Initially, I didn’t have much money to do the work I wanted to. Instead we had to adapt: the old gents’ toilets became a makeshift laundry, and the ladies’ became our bathroom.The first thing I did was to paint the interior all the colours of the rainbow. I went around with a chalk and marked where each colour should go The next step was moving in my beloved artworks. I have a number of paintings by Dougie Fields, and as my penthouse and living quarters are at the very top of the house, I had to get them hoisted up by a crane. I also have a collection of ceramics by Kate Malone and Carol McNicol, which are hung around the house.Gradually it has taken shape, but there is still a great deal to do and it is really still a work in progress My favourite room is the penthouse.

The views are amazing: I can see London Bridge, Norman Foster’s Gherkin and, on a good day, the whole of the east London skyline. The top floors have wonderful light and when I am away, a friend often uses the space to teach yoga classes: it’s an ideal place for worshipping the sun.I love my home, mainly because I’m surrounded by beautiful objects, many of which are by friends, and others which are pieces I have designed myself. One of my favourite pieces is a table I designed in 1969 when I was teaching. It is made of Perspex and has little Zs hanging from the edges.I love entertaining, and cooking is the one thing that relaxes me and enables me to switch off from my work completely. Upstairs, next to the kitchen, I have a large leather banquette; it’s a very sociable area. I recently threw a 60th birthday party for the jewellery designer Andrew Logan, and had 40 people over for dinner, which was great fun.

Andrew has designed many pieces in my home, including a fabulous golden throne and a glass chandelier with Z-shaped droplets cascading down from it. He has such a bold style, which I love.Living and working in the same space does have advantages, but the most obvious problem is that you can never really escape. One place where I find it very easy to relax in the summer is my garden.It’s a really beautiful suntrap, with 40-year-old camellias which I moved from my garden in Notting Hill. I also have a huge polystyrene gold Buddha that was given to me after a party at Aspinalls.

Dr Hansen, who directs Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said the Bush administration appointee had demanded to review his lectures and publications in advance.After he gave a speech highly critical of the administration’s global warming policies last year, he told The New York Times, he was warned that there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to make similar criticisms.His complaints have drawn sympathy from Republicans as well as Democrats. If he was anything at all in the realm of ideas, principles, doctrines, he was a species of nihilist; he was an essentially destructive force, a revolutionist without any revolutionary vision, a rebel without a cause.”. A Bush administration appointee at Nasa has been forced to resign after accusations that he tried to censor scientists who took issue with the White House line on global warming and the origins of the universe. George Deutsch, a public relations officer at Nasa who previously worked on President George Bush’s re-election campaign, was accused of trying to keep the media away from the agency’s chief climate change scientist, James Hansen, after Dr Hansen called publicly for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
According to an e-mail shown to The New York Times, he also told a Nasa web designer to add the word “theory” to every reference of the Big Bang – the most prevalent scientific explanation of the origins of the universe, which is hotly contested by creationists, including many right-wing Christian supporters of the President.Mr Deutsch’s resignation appeared to have as much to do with the fact that he lied on his job application – he said he had a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Texas A&M University, when in fact he never graduated – as with the way he did his job.Nasa officials refused to be drawn on the reasons for his resignation, but its chief administrator recently sent an e-mail to all his staff assuring them it was not the job of public affairs officers “to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by Nasa’s technical staff”.Dr Hansen and others have argued that Mr Deutsch was only part of a much broader problem of political interference at the agency.

But the best summation is from his biographer, Richard H Rovere: “He was not totalitarian in any significant sense, or even reactionary The social and economic order didn’t interest him. To Anatole Lieven, the historian of modern US nationalism, he nursed an Irish-Catholic hatred of the intellectual ?tes of the Wasp establishment. A chronic heavy drinker, he suffered from cirrhosis and died of hepatitis in May 1957 at 48.What had it all been for? To modern-day supporters, like the right-wing pundit Anne Coulter, he represented an expression of popular dissatisfaction. On 2 December 1954, the Senate voted to “condemn” McCarthy by 67 votes to 22. He lost the chairmanship of the Government Committee that had been his throne since 1950 His power base had vanished His public support dwindled away The press wouldn’t touch a McCarthy story He was finished.

In July, a senator accused McCarthy of 46 counts of “conduct unbecoming a member of the US Senate”, a rap-sheet later reduced to two It was enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?”By now the American media had stopped being too frightened of McCarthy to speak Columnists went on the offensive. Ed Murrow openly criticised McCarthy’s methods on See It Now on 9 March 1954. Three weeks later, McCarthy responded by attacking Murrow on the programme.

The public, seeing their anti-Red champion as a sneering roughneck, withdrew their support. They were especially struck by one interchange, when the Army’s attorney-general Joseph Welch listened to McCarthy bad-mouth yet another junior lawyer and exploded: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator You’ve done enough. The Army retaliated by feeding journalists with stories that would embarrass the senator – such as, that he and his Committee sidekick Roy Cohn had conspired to prevent their friend David Schine from being drafted, and that Cohn had put pressure on Army personnel to give Schine special privileges.The Army-McCarthy Hearings lasted 36 days and were watched on new-fangled televisions by 20 million Americans. Truman lost the 1952 election, and the Republican Eisenhower moved into the White House.

Why should ordinary peoples’ day out in London be ruined by this inflammatory protest? We will respect religion seems to be the message being drummed into me. For the sake of future generations, is it not about time for laws to be passed whereby we cannot indoctrinate our children with dubious hypotheses?JON MACKENZIEPORTSMOUTHSir: Are the Danish newspaper’s cartoons as offensive as we are being told they are? I learned from Dominic Lawson’s article (“Hysteria, hypocrisy and half-truths”, 7 February) that Islamisk Trossamfund, the Danish Muslim group that raised the issue, must have thought they were not, as they have circulated three extra, very unpleasant, cartoons to make sure that every Muslim who saw them would be offended.It appears that all over the Muslim world the newspaper is being blamed, not for what its artists drew, but for what they did not draw. Why should I respect blind faith?Until we all embrace reason and use facts as the basis of our opinion and beliefs, the world will never be a safe place. Never mind freedom of speech – what about a free press?How appalled I was to learn that there are plans afoot for a demonstration in London. Or better still, anyone over the age of 64 in any country should pop down to the British embassy with a box of matches.I was equally unsettled to discover that the British press “chose not” (rather than “were clearly too scared”) to publish the cartoons.

Are people really so absurdly stupid?Or perhaps they have a point, in which case, Katie Gent, who took offence at your recent caricature of Menzies Campbell with a Zimmer frame (letter, 8 February), ought to pop down to E14 and set fire to your premises. The world-wide Muslim community already feels that it is the object of a global crusade by an American-led administration. For most Muslims, this issue is just one part of a campaign of hatred that includes Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the invasion of Iraq.Has Europe learned nothing from the holocaust against Jews in Europe? That too began with a propaganda campaign that vilified a minority.KHOLA HASANCLAYHALL, ESSEXSir: I found it unsettling when I read stories about nutcases burning embassies in several locations throughout the world in response to cartoons published in Denmark. Freedom of speech is not a synonym for freedom to spread hatred and unjust stereotyping. Prophet Mohammed is a father-figure for Muslims, adored, loved and respected. To imply that his teachings legitimise terrorist activities is in itself a deliberate act of incitement to hatred. Following the publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohamed, I watched with horror news reports of demonstrators in London calling for a repeat of 7 July suicide bombings and beheadings.Memories of the insanity of book and flag burnings during the Rushdie fiasco came flooding back – I had hoped that the Muslim community had learned some lessons from that farce.

I know the police are planning to prosecute those protestors who carried the inflammatory placards, and I hope that Muslims in Britain will make an effort to debate the issue intelligently rather than resort to violence.But at the same time, I ask our non Muslim, co-Europeans to be aware of the incredible hurt felt by the global Muslim community by the cartoons. We have devalued child care and by so doing, devalued those who care for children, family life and children themselves.I hope that when our two daughters are of an age to be having their own families they will have a genuine choice over what to do with their lives and, if they feel like it, will be able to conclude without guilt, pressure or shame that what they really want to do is to bring up their own children.KAREN RODGERSCAMBRIDGE Cartoons are part of campaign of hatred Sir: I am a Muslim writer and lecturer. Some are genuinely delighted to be in full-time paid employment and to use some of the money earned to pay for child “care”. The majority of women I have spoken to who have returned to paid employment often when their children are still very young, have expressed regret and explained that they had to as it was expected of them, by partners and/or society as a whole.The irony of social change over the last 40 years is that then women could not say “Who am I, what do I want out of life?” because they were under huge pressure to stay at home; now women often feel huge guilt about not being in paid employment; some because family income is low, others because they are “too expensive” to look after their own children.