Martin Kettle’s article is very timely (How the past can help us reach across political divides, 27 December). Sylvia Pankhurst was indeed “an incredibly interesting and unusual person”. It is also worth mentioning, among much else, that her “left communism” was ultra-democratic, if not very practical (see her A Constitution for British Soviets in the Workers’ Dreadnought, 19 June 1920). She was one of the targets of Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder. She formed her own communist party a year before the CPGB and, after it merged with the “orthodox” communists, she was deemed to be a member, although in prison at the time. She was expelled in September 1921 after refusing to hand over the Dreadnought to the party so that they could close it down. Her paper survived until June 1924.

Ian Bullock

Brighton

• A better site for a blue plaque for Gertrude Bell (Report, 26 December) would be at Queen’s College, in Harley Street, London. She spent two years as a boarder at this pioneering school and was greatly influenced by her history teachers, who encouraged her to apply to Oxford.

James Hutchinson

Retired senior tutor, Queen’s College

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