Habermas and the lessons of history | Brief letters

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One thing missing from most of the commentaries following the death of Jürgen Habermas (Editorial, 18 March) was his use of the expression “history as a learning process”. That he took the idea seriously was understandable, given that he was born in Germany in 1929, but the sad truth is that politicians keep making the same old mistakes even when the consequences of their actions are staring them in the face.
Dr Charles Turner
University of Warwick

• “Testing of water from Lough Neagh, which has a surface area 26 times bigger than Windermere” (Report, 14 March). I am in Ohio and I don’t know the size of Windermere. I reckon it is about 26 times smaller than Lough Neagh.
Mary Jo Hanlon
North Royalton, Ohio, US

• We are doing our bit to uphold the existence of pointless units of measurement (Letters, 18 March). Every year we have gooseberry shows in the area, in which the fruit is weighed in pennyweights and grains (me neither).
Geoff Holman
Knutsford, Cheshire

• On children’s first fibs (Letters, 16 March), when my third child was two he insisted that his hands weren’t red because he’d been playing with red ink, but because he’d been holding a red asteroid that had fallen from the sky.
Elli Woollard
London

• My sister has never been allowed to forget that when I, as a newborn, suddenly began to cry, she rushed up to my mother and said: “He’s crying for his feed, Mummy. I didn’t bite his toe.”
Allan Wilcox
Beverley, East Yorkshire

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