Quentin Richard Stephen Letts (born 6 February 1963) is a British journalist and theatre critic, writing for The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Oldie and New Statesman, and previously for The Times.
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He is the son of Richard Letts and Jocelyn Elizabeth Letts (née Adami). He grew up in Cirencester and at one point attended Oakley Hall Preparatory School, which was run by his father.[1] [2] He was later educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, Bellarmine College, Kentucky (now Bellarmine University), Trinity College, Dublin where he edited a number of publications, including the satirical Piranha, and studied Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1982–86) at Jesus College, Cambridge, taking a Diploma in Classical Archaeology.
Letts has written for a number of British newspapers since beginning his journalistic career in 1987. His first post was with the Peterborough gossip column in the Daily Telegraph. For a time in the mid-1990s he was New York correspondent for The Times. He is the person behind the Daily Mail's Clement Crabbe column and is also the paper's theatre critic and political sketchwriter. He lists his hobbies in Who's Who as "gossip" and "character defenestration".
A regular victim of the latter trait was the former Speaker of the British House of Commons Michael Martin whom he nicknamed "Gorbals Mick". Many see this term as offensive, as "Mick" can also be used as a sectarian term of abuse towards Catholics of Irish descent, and Martin is not from and has never lived in the Gorbals, a poor area of Glasgow.[3]
His columns have been described as "attempts at faintly homophobic humour" in The Guardian,[4] which accused him of being "busy guarding what children should and shouldn't see in the theatre".[5] He has also been accused of misogyny over an attack on Harriet Harman.[6]
Letts presented an edition of the BBC current affairs programme Panorama broadcast on April 20, 2009. The programme dealt with the growing criticism of the influence of health and safety on various aspects of British life.
Letts has written three books, the bestselling 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, Bog-Standard Britain, and Letts Rip! all with his UK publisher Constable & Robinson. In Bog Standard Britain he attacks what he sees as Britain's culture of mediocrity, where political correctness has, in his words "crushed the individualism from our nation of once indignant eccentrics". 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain has sold around 45,000 copies and was reviewed in The Spectator as "an angry book, beautifully written". In a published extract, he argued that 1970s feminist writer Germaine Greer may, by asserting female sexuality, have given rise to the modern phenomenon of "ladettes" and that this encouraged men to behave badly to women, thus doing the cause of equality a disservice.[7]
In March 2010 Letts won "Critic of the Year" at the British Press Awards 2010. The judges called Letts a “phenomenon always out there trudging theatreland, prolific and highly entertaining.”
Letts married Lois Rathbone in 1996. The couple have a son Claud, and two daughters Eveleen and Honor. They live in How Caple, Herefordshire.[8]