It would be charitable to assume that the essay on Lust ("Seven Deadly Sins", 17 September) was a spoof, designed to remind us of the nastiness of a certain kind of man-to-man talk. But perhaps Terence Kealey ought to have read Middlemarch before declaring it to be the "great academic novel of the 19th century", or asserting that it chronicles "lust between male scholars and female acolytes".
Ben Knights, Durham.