A garden bridge over troubled water

Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson has proposed a 22-mile bridge across the Channel. Photograph: Peter Nicholls/PA

With all due respect to Phil Neville as a former player, England’s women’s football team deserve much better (Never managed and didn’t apply: how the FA made Phil Neville its No 1, 17 January). We are meant to be promoting gender equality, aren’t we? So the best team in Europe deserves the best available manager in Europe. Just an idea: Carlo Ancelotti is free and apparently moving back to London. He would bring prestige to women’s football and spectators to the stadiums. Why not approach him?
Maya Fish
London

• May I add a footnote to your intriguing list of books with identical titles coming close together (The week in books, 13 January)? I wonder if many of us lack the ability to come up with something wholly original – I don’t necessarily mean a title as striking as Glenn Patterson’s The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, just one that avoids the obvious. Alas, the obvious is often the easiest option. My own Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading was published by Somerville Press in autumn 2015. Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading is due this March from Square Peg. Coincidence or what?
Patricia Craig
Antrim

• England never “took over” Calais (Letters, 18 January). The city was the only Plantagenet possession left in France in 1453 after the English (eventually) lost the 100 years war. The English won the battle at Agincourt but in the end did not win the war.
Maidi Brown
Shenfield, Essex

• Should Boris’s bridge over the Channel be a garden bridge (Johnson’s bridge over troubled water, 19 January)?
Colin Richards
Spark Bridge, Cumbria

• Isn’t Ben Bradley missing a trick in relation to castrating the poor (‘Vasectomies for jobless’ MP to keep job as Tory’s youth chair, 18 January)? If they are allowed to breed, the progeny could be sold as an excellent source of meat.
Roy Creamer
Rotherham, South Yorkshire

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