Cleveland Street Sir: While indulging in the occasional split infinitive,
I may not have the literary elegance of style shown by your reviewer Benny Green, who takes me to task for what he calls my 'syntactical chromosomes' in his review of my book The Cleveland Street Scandal. However, I have always tried to ensure that, my researches should be accurate. My book even contains a frontispiece map of the West End of London as it was at the time of the Cleveland Street affair in 1889. If Mr Green had looked at this before writing his pettifogging notice of my book, he would have observed that the arrow pointing towards Cleveland Street marks the Middlesex Hospital, and due east as the crow flies across Cleveland Street one reaches Tottenham Court Road. Indeed when the hospital was later extended to the east, the notorious No 19 and adjacent houses on the west side of Cleveland Street were pulled down to make room for the hospital's private wing. My description of Cleveland Street as being between the Middlesex Hospital and Tottenham Court Road is, therefore, quite accurate in the circumstances.
H. Montgomery Hyde Westwell House, Tenterden, Kent
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