Genoa and Kipling

SIR – The news of the shocking failure of the bridge in Genoa (report, August 15) brings to mind the poem “Hymn of Breaking Strain” composed by Rudyard Kipling in 1935, the first verse of which reads:

The careful text-books measure (Let all who build beware!)

The load, the shock, the pressure Material can bear.

So, when the buckled girder

Lets down the grinding span,

The blame of loss, or murder,

Is laid upon the man.

Not on the Stuff – the Man!

As so often, Kipling hits the nail on the head. George Lamb

Weston-on-the-green, Oxfordshire