Michael Nelson writes: As the general manager of Reuters, I had an interview in Havana on April 18, 1985 with Fidel Castro (obituary, Nov 28). The meeting, at which I was accompanied by my wife and our Havana correspondent, started at midnight. I broke protocol after five and a half hours by saying that my wife and I had to leave to fly to Kingston, Jamaica, en route to San Francisco. Castro was visibly annoyed and reluctant to let us go. “You must come back again for a proper meeting, not a short one like this,” he said, and tried to fix a date.
After we reached the airport the official who was looking after us expressed his regret that my wife would not be able to leave because the plane had been overbooked. She went back to the swimming pool at the house that they had put at our disposal to await a plane due to leave the next day. When I boarded my plane I was staggered to find it half-empty. I was greatly relieved when I arrived in San Francisco to find that she had checked into the hotel.
Giles Heron writes: Your excellent obituary of Richard Taylor (Dec 1), outstanding headmaster of the Purcell music school, coincided with your front-page column about a school ending the tradition of pupils raising their hands in class. Richard went one better. When about to take a class in front of a ministry inspector, he told his pupils to reverse normal practice and raise a hand in response to his questions only when uncertain or ignorant of the answers, and to keep their hands down when they knew them. Naturally a forest of eager hands went up when he asked a general probing question. These he ignored. Instead, he asked an apparently ignorant pupil. Surprise, surprise, he got the right answer. The inspector beheld a majority of interested pupils, keen to participate and a sensitive teacher who didn’t neglect his less confident charges, yet even they knew the answers. What a teacher!
Lord Wright of Richmond writes: I met Lord Prior (obituary, Dec 13) only once, when I was on leave from Damascus in 1980, and paid a call on the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington. Afterwards, he accompanied me to outside his office, where Lord Prior, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, was waiting. After Lord Carrington introduced me as Our Man in Syria, Lord Prior remarked: “God, that must be a bloody awful job.” I replied that I much enjoyed the job. To which Lord Prior said: “I wish you could say that about mine.”