Sir, - With regard to Brian Barrington's somewhat pedantic letter (October 27th) and Liam Carson's (October 30th), it is impossible to deal adequately with this subject in the space of one short letter and, in any case, the matter was largely covered in a series of letters to The Irish Times in 1997.
So let me simply state that my reading of Francis Stuart's writings (in particular his novels The Pillar of Cloud and Black List Section H), his wife Madeleine's memoir, Manna In The Morning, and a number of letters and articles by such luminaries as Anthony Cronin, Paul Durcan, Dermot Bolger, Hugo Hamilton, Colm Toibin and Ulick O'Connor, provided sufficient evidence for me to form the conclusion that he was not a Nazi collaborator nor an anti-Semite in the sense that I understand those terms. I believe that any fair-minded reader would conclude likewise.
"Collaborator" is too strong a word. His association with the Nazis led to disillusionment and his guilt was more than sufficiently expiated by his subsequent suffering and near-starvation during and after the latter part of the war.
In his long lifetime Francis Stuart was much more interested in writing, religion, sex and horse-racing than in any politics, and his strongest hatred was for the consumer society. - Yours, etc.,
James Evans, Lower Churchtown Road, Dublin 14.