Mr. Barton pointed at a motto above the inner doors of the Y's entrance, words that for decades greeted visitors.
For 15 tense minutes the audience watched the various entrances until word was passed that the lion had been captured at the entrance to the ladies' room.
John Marsh, via email Now a successful novelist, Buarque was always at root a writer and poet, as entranced by words as he was by football in 1950s Rio.
But the truly striking aspect of the new school was the gigantic sign of France's national motto placed above its main entrance, the words 'Liberte, Egalité, Fraternité' embossed in 10-foot-high black letters.
Tim Barlow Chester As a native of southern suburbia transplanted to Cheshire over 30 years ago and a mere five miles from Northwich, I was entranced by words like lozzack (Letters, 21 December), not to mention wazzock, as in "You spawny-eyed wazzock".
"Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY". .
Perhaps the most telling inscription can be found scribbled above the entrance: the words Sex Bar, along with an arrow pointing up the adjacent staircase.
But before you jump in your car and head for the nearest turnpike entrance, one word of caution: don't.
At the entrance the word "naked" is spelled out in buzzy, hard-to-miss electric lights — an approach that conveys a kind of hip accessibility but that also, in rendering the word as if on a marquee, brings a second word quickly to mind: ladies.
No novelist worth reading ever sat at home, entranced with the words spooling out.
