Sir, – To supplement Brian Trench's letter on Heinrich Böll (May 4th), after Heinrich Böll was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College in December 1972, he met members of Trinity's German department over a cup of tea and answered the somewhat naive question as to whether Ireland was not an altogether different place from the subject of his Irisches Tagebuch by asserting the book's fictional nature, despite the evident factual references in it. This remark needs to be understood in the context of his novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum from around this time, where the narrator reclaims fictional narrative as a source of truth, in face of the gutter press's purveying of fake news in the guise of factual reporting. – Yours, etc,
Dr GILBERT CARR,
Fellow Emeritus,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.