Roast beef

I was interested in the article on comedy roasts (Have you heard the one about Sharon Osbourne?, Media, 5 April). I recently read in an 1805 volume of the Lady's Magazine a piece by "the celebrated Henry Fielding" about roasting. It seems the butt of the ridicule wasn't then a willing one. "There is a certain diversion called roasting, which, notwithstanding it is in some vogue with the polite part of the world, I have no notion of ... I am always apt, at such times, to pity the person who is thus turned into ridicule, and seldom or never join the laugh against him ... A roaster gives me as low an idea of his wit, as a bully does of his courage."

Elizabeth Manning

Malvern, Worcestershire

• The claim that the blue plaque in memory of the White Rabbit, Edward Yeo-Thomas GC, was the first to commemorate a secret agent (Report, 1 April) does a disservice to the memory of Violette Szabo GC, the SOE agent murdered at Ravensbrück concentration camp in February 1945. She is remembered by a blue plaque erected at 18 Burnley Road, Stockwell, London, in 1981. English Heritage might also care to correct its spelling of her name on its database.

Séamus MacBride

London

• The proposed British space agency (Report, 24 March) should look for its staff among the group of brilliant scientists that must exist somewhere in Rome and has managed to transport the Vatican to another planet. After all, it is rocket science (whoops, wrong thread).

Beverley Charles Rowe

London

• Is the euphemism "hard-working families" (Letters, 2 April) a way for politicians to be able to say "working-class people" without needing to address the real political issue of our divided society?

Jane Gibson

Llanberis, Gwynedd

• You missed one (1000 things for kids to do, 27 March to 1 April). Be seen and not heard.

Jonathan Harris

Gorran, Cornwall

• Which part of "This correspondence has run its course" don't you understand (Letters, 5 April)?

Karl Sabbagh

Newbold on Stour, Warwickshire

Today's best video

  • migrant composite

    Death at sea

    How five friends – Moaaz, Majd, Rasha, Kinan and Khalid – fled war-torn Syria to embark on a dangerous trip to Europe
  • Aimee Pistorius

    'Oscar falsely portrayed in court'

    The brother and sister of Oscar Pistorius tell of their heartbreak at his portrayal in court
  • Rebel leader ducks for cover

    Explosion rocks rebel meeting in Donetsk

    Pro-Russian separatists duck for cover as powerful explosion rocks news conference
  • Blizzard in Himalayas

    Ferocity of blizzard in Himalayas

    Footage shot by hiker shows snowstorm that engulfed Nepal's Annapurna trail

Today in pictures

More from Brief letters
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/apr/06/roasting-sharon-osbourne-blue-plaques
www.theguardian.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-42
116072
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NHLEJSO6HZ36KPT4MHDMVGPOKXQ3NQ4Y
<urn:uuid:1736e9a8-1879-40a5-9f72-2d9c57f918be>
2014-10-21T04:18:08Z
23.235.46.207
sha1:IAU5DW27X22L2Q3K64ZFRL5BCVUM2P5W
<urn:uuid:25e67f93-dfa2-4a2b-9dd7-6bb2571946d6>
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/apr/06/roasting-sharon-osbourne-blue-plaques
response
<urn:uuid:2948cb70-b967-4d61-add8-0e24413a339a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-42
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for October 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf