Letters from people like Tom Cooper (Letters, December 19) are dangerous, as they can feed the fantasies of those who like to justify the terrorism of the IRA, they must be challenged.

Joseph Stalin was violent and ruthless from an early age, and his criminality, his talents as an organiser and a manipulator, and his over-weening ambition, facilitated his later rise to power, says Geoffrey Roberts. 

Noah Barleywater Runs Away

ALMOST every day, virulently anti-semitic cartoons appear in the Arab press portraying Jews as dogs or pigs (which are lower than dirt in the Muslim outlook), or as serpents with a stranglehold over international finance or the media.