Authors Electric

On holiday recently, I ended up reading the newspaper more than usual. (Books too, which was far more pleasant an activity.) This was all down to a bad back, which had the twofold effect of stopping me from swimming and increasing my general grumpiness. I share this (as they say) by way of an apology for what follows… though I’m not really sorry.  You, on the other hand, may be, if you stay to the end of a grammatical grouse that has been brooding in my breast for years.  ‘An arrant pedantry up with which I will not put’ Sir Winston Churchill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill No, it’s not the split infinitive. Nor ending sentences with a preposition (I’m with Winston Churchill on that one, the rule against doing so being An Arrant Pedantry Up With Which I Will Not Put). It does have to do with prepositions, though, indirectly; but mostly it centres on a supposed elegance of style popular in the loftiest newspapers, and which is simply grammatically wrong. ...

Atticus, The Sunday Times, 21.10.18 Flicking through The Sunday Times this week, my eye was caught by this snide little piece in the media gossip column, Atticus (pic, right): Amusing, yes, especially for Sir David Hare.   It’s not his fault that the public don’t know Woolf’s work well enough to distinguish which words she genuinely wrote and which are the ones that he, adapting a novel about Woolf for the screen, makes her say. How hilarious that Hare’s clever line is now attributed to the author herself! And how naïve of the academic, bless them, to confuse a fictional film with a biopic! I mean, who does that?   No one, obvs.  Except the countless people on the internet who now attribute Hare’s line to Woolf. QED. Richmond - a fate worse than death, as Virginia Woolf (above, Getty Images) didn't say.  Does anyone else hear a great clunk of irony in Atticus’s stonkingly patronising attitude to the academic? She or he is the...