Sir – Even Hugh Jaeger’s description of the New Bodleian as ‘an insult to public baths’ (Letters, June 3) by comparison fails to do justice to the full banality of this brooding pile. To my eyes it has always resembled nothing so much as that monument to Communism, the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, while its dim interior is remarkable only for the stale stench of linoleum.

The rationale of that baleful ideology has long been demolished; it is high time that the New Bodleian went likewise.

Michael Montgomery, Idbury