While I have contempt for Enoch Powell and frustrated respect for Keir Starmer, both had a point about our “island of strangers”. The internet has made us a world of strangers. We’re more connected than at any time in history, yet apparently unable to connect.

This leaves us unable to focus on our common cause and work together for the good of people or planet. My reading of books and publications like the New Statesman tells me this is no accident: keep us divided over minor differences, leaving those we should be really troubled about – and who control the online world – to torch the planet, unimpeded by people of any colour, sex, gender, religion or class.Catriona Stewart, Northwich, Cheshire Class dismissed Last week’s Cover Story has raised a few questions for me. So, women who have greater privilege than working-class women feel undervalued?

Surely this isn’t a gender issue but a feeling that society is failing in many ways, and that working-class women cope with disappointment better having had centuries to get used to it? Anna worries men don’t talk about “what the Department for Work and Pensions is doing to disabled people”. Isn’t this due to her only seeming to associate with middle-class blokes and not those directly affected, such as working-class men, or those who are disabled and excluded from the groups she obviously frequents?

The story highlights the need for people of different classes (and genders) to mix in order to understand that everyone is different and faces unique (but at times) adjoining challenges.Ian Jones, North Shields A Shropshire middle-aged man Tom McTague’s references to AE Housman were a bit misleading. Housman was born in 1859, and his collection of poems A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896, when he was 37. When the First World War broke out he was 55.

He was hardly “that great poet of the Great War generation”, which suggests he was of that generation, rather than a big influence on it. The claim that, “Housman, after all, was writing his reactionary poetry as a young man in the late-19th century” rather stretches the definition of “young man”. Then we have the question: “Aren’t there Housmans in each new generation of young men – romantic and reactionary, obsessed with notions of heroism and history?” Housman was obsessed with his mortality and that of others, as well as who might be obsessed by notions of heroism and history.Dave Sissons, Sheffield I share the editor’s fondness for AE Houseman.

With the Iran situation in mind he might have also quoted: The laws of God, the laws of man,He may keep that will and can;Not I: let God and man decree;Laws for themselves and not for me;And if my ways are not as theirsLet them mind their own affairs. Those words are in Housman’s Last Poems. They could serve as Trump’s last words as well.Colin Richards, Spark Bridge, Cumbria Accommodating Commodus ​When comparing Donald Trump to the most egregious Roman emperors, Nero and Caligula are the two most commonly mentioned.

But there is a third, and Katie Stallard’s “Donald Trump and the art of the cage fight” brings him to mind. Commodus was narcissistic and often in the company of gladiators to boost his public image. Betrayed in a conspiracy by those nearest to him, was strangled in his bath by his wrestling partner, Narcissus.Tom Stubbs, Surbiton, Greater London Emperor’s new cloth Freddie Hayward tell us that the spat between the White House and Pope Leo “shows that Trumpland is built upon paradoxes”.

Here’s another: King Charles has been invited to the US on a state visit. He is supreme governor of the Church of England, created 500 years ago as a result of a monarch’s displeasure with a pope. Charles could offer Roman Catholic members of Trump’s administration the chance to attend confirmation classes at Lambeth Palace with a view to converting to CofE, subject to their being prepared to accept the authority of Archbishop Mullally.Les Bright, Exeter, Devon Solitary men I was pleased to read in the latest edition Anoosh Chakelian’s piece on Britain’s social crisis.

As someone who has spent ten years working in front-line support roles in homelessness, addiction and sexual violence services, I found it captured the scale of the problems we are facing, without being mean, patronising or voyeuristic. Anoosh describes what she sees, and in doing so conveys the severity of how an increasing number of people in Britain are living. Addiction and poor mental-health are driven by loneliness and disconnection, the conditions for which have thrived in the slow death of commun