Au contraire it is the recent narrowing of the remit of Radio

Au contraire, it is the recent narrowing of the remit of Radio 3 that, to my mind, represents the greatest single loss to British culture. A few years ago Radio 3 was an arts network that was not uncomfortable with the term “high culture”. I have recently been examining the schedules for the Seventies There was always plenty of good music. A fair amount could be called “classical”, although there was also western music from medieval to a good leavening of new commissions.In its heyday, Radio 3 would broadcast significant chunks of poetry several times a week, modern, classical and translated (when we would expect, often, to hear the original, before or after). Gay marriage might, but I don’t see you or your church advocating that somehow.JAMES SCOTT Milton Keynes Arts on the BBC Sir, “Why can’t Radio 3 simply play classical music”, Janet Street Porter asks us (Opinion, 6 May). Even if (a big if!) everything he says about waiting for sex until marriage were true for heterosexual young people, it would still leave gays nowhere.The subtext to his belief is that gays don’t actually exist, but are really heterosexuals gone wrong, who can be therefore be terrorised into hetero-sex by guilt and condemnation in this world and threat of hellfire in the next. As a gay man who grew up in an evangelical home, I experienced this soul-destroying belief painfully at first hand.Sorry Nigel, your wedded bliss won’t work for those of us who feel no sexual attraction whatever for the sex opposite, without which man-woman marriage makes no sense.

However, the local fascists involved would have been the Hungarian Arrow Cross, not the Romanian Iron Guard.DONALD ROY London SW15 Hellfire for gays Sir: Your Christian youth-worker correspondent Nigel Roberts is not telling the whole story. Like other Jews in Hungary, they were not exposed to deportation or worse until the Germans occupied it on 17 March 1944. After then they were indeed moved into ghettos and then dispatched to Auschwitz. The principal cause was culpable neglect by the military regime of Marshal Antonescu, which had suppressed the Iron Guard in Transdnistria and the delay in improving conditions there contributed to his successful prosecution for war crimes and subsequent execution in 1946.The others who perished were the Jews of Northern Transylvania (including Ruscova), which had been transferred to Hungary under the Vienna Award of 30 August 1940.

It was never in a position to murder more than a handful of Romanian Jews.Of the several hundred thousand who perished, more than half did so in camps operated by the Romanian occupation regime in Transdnistria (currently shared between Moldova and Ukraine) during the first 18 months of the invasion of the Soviet Union. We are currently reviewing a number of applications.Professor COLIN BLAKEMORE Chief Executive Medical Research Council London W1Sir: As an ME sufferer since 1987 I was very pleased to read this article by Jerome Burne which explained the controversy in the medical profession about my illness.ME is a serious disease with a physical cause and the issues which Mr Burne raised are important to myself and the estimated 240,000 sufferers in the UK as well as doctors who treat us. I cannot write any more as I am too ill, but felt I had to say, “Well done!”NAME WITHHELD Romanian fascists Sir: Rich Cookson and Phil Chamberlain (“The Tory who’s the toast of Transylvania”, 12 May) are unfair to the Iron Guard, unprepossessing fascists as its members were. Patients have helped shape the treatment manuals for those options in each trial while the PACE trial protocol has been developed with the help of the leading charity Action for ME.We are always open to applications for high-quality research and have actively encouraged the submission of other proposals for CFS/ME – from biological research to treatment studies.