Old-fashioned murder
Sir: There's not the slightest hint in George Orwell's essay that the murders people liked to read about 'were the consequence of a hypocritical society' (Roy Liddle, 'The Foxy Knoxy case', 17 November). Of course there were hypocrites. But the hypocrisy that led to murder was that of the murderer: he valued his reputation as good family man so strongly that he protected his relapse into sexual sin by mur- der. Orwell wrote the essay when conscience- less killings of the Meredith Kercher type had begun to appear for the first time. That's why he called the essay 'The Decline of the English Murder' — murder with a moral dimension at its heart was being replaced by murder in the no man's land of selfish sexual nihilism Norman Dennis Director of Community Studies, Civitas, London SW1
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