Authors Electric

Now THIS is what I should have posted last month, just ahead of the 80th anniversary of VE Day on 8th May, and if I’d been more switched on (and less distracted by the disturbingly named Mandela effect ), I would have done. Still, we’re only a few days away from celebrating the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings on 5th June, 1944, so very much still in the remembering mode, in which eye witness accounts have increasing value as that generation passes away altogether. Going through the papers left by my late mother, Ruth Heppel, I found all the letters she wrote to her elder brother and sister-in-law in India during the Second World War. As a portrait of a teenager living through the Blitz (her home was bombed twice and the family had to be rehoused), they make a fascinating record; but what stands out is the one dated 10th May 1945, in which Ruth, by then a 19 year-old art student, gives an astonishingly vivid account of the VE Day celebrations in London. The joyous uproar she d...

I have just re-read Wild Swans , by Jung Chang, for my book group. It wasn’t my choice, as I read it several decades ago, and I thought I remembered it. But once I opened it I realised there was so much I didn’t remember at all. Even though I had a Polish father, and was well aware of the paranoia associated with a totalitarian government due in part to a trip to Poland in the middle of the Cold War in 1966, I still hadn’t grasped the full implications of mind control. Mao was a ruthless and heartless dictator, and the hero worship he encouraged looks far more familiar today than it did then. The England in which I grew up was a safe and relatively honest country, and I simply couldn’t believe it could be so dangerous to say the wrong thing. The China of Wild Swans bears a strong resemblance to the North Korea and Russia of today, and strong rulers are in vogue with populations who believe what they read on Tiktok, Instagram and Telegram. This time, I saw things very differently from ...

It so happens that May is a singularly appropriate month for the following grammar grumble. Call me a pedant - sorry, madam, no pedant available just now but more will be arriving shortly ( cue howls of joyous mirth ) - but Things Have Got to a Pretty Pass. No, really.  Winston Churchill: a ban on prepositions ending sentences was a practice up with which he would not put. It’s not about split infinitives. Nor about prepositions not being allowed at the ends of sentences (up with which Winston Churchill famously refused to put). Nothing can be done with ‘she spoke to my friend and I’, I’m afraid, except to stand doggedly by me and try not to wince when others don’t. Thing is, all these infelicities (though the preposition rule is not an infelicity, Churchill was right there) don’t muddle meanings. You know exactly what people are saying, even if the grammar isn’t perfect.  No. What flummoxed me a few days ago was this sub-heading in The Times , in a story about the Factor 8 ...

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. ...