Peter Harvey’s ‘Guide to English Language Usage’ usefully complements Burchfield’s Fowler: other new books warmly recommended, Lorna Lloyd’s study of the Commonwealth High Commissioner, and Frank Kennedy’s memoir ‘Dust Suspended’. All four have something in common [More >>>]
Six cheers at least for the National Health Service whose guest I have been at a big teaching hospital for a week with an infected leg. Massive improvements since last NHS hospital experience some years ago: impeccable medical and nursing care and exhaustive tests revealing new and unsuspected conditions [More >>>]
Numerous linguistic and substantive howlers enliven a single Guardiuan editorial. Invitation to visit a new language discussion forum [More >>>]
Some more vicious assaults on the English language, committed in the print media and by Mr Blair … [More >>>]
‘Tis the season to be illiterate, apparently, as well as jolly. The following howlers are nearly all taken from the letters page of a single issue of the Guardian [More >>>]
The classified (confidential or secret) text of Carne Ross’s evidence on Iraq to the Butler Inquiry has been published by the Independent but also first on the website of the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. This raises serious questions about the ability and desirability of government to protect its sensitive internal information from publication and the public’s ‘right to know’, issues raised earlier over FCO attempts to stop Craig Murray publishing classified documents on the Web and in his book [More >>>]
Alan Mumford’s cartoon history of the Labour Party (£19.99 from [email protected]), by a cartoon and contemporary political history pundit and an old friend, is a must-buy, and makes a perfect Christmas present — no, nothing in it financially for me [More >>>]
Australia is the second-best country for the good life, and Australians the best people to have around in a tight corner. Useful column on this by Engel in today’s FT. Aussie-Pom relations have an edge, but in the end we’re mates [More >>>]
We older Old Labour folk were more amused than saddened by this, in today’s Guardian Corrections column: “In a front-page sketch, Remember Nye Bevan’s warning …, December 5, we mistook, both in the heading and text, Mr Bevan (1897-1960) for his contemporary Ernest Bevin (1884-1951). It was Ernest Bevin, when foreign secretary, who pleaded with colleagues not to send him naked to the conference table.” [More >>>]
Today I transfer to a new computer, with all the ghastly and time-consuming business of installing dozens of programs from CDs and the web, transferring thousands of data files from CDs, and the rest of it. So there’ll be a (no doubt welcome) period of silence on my part, as Attlee requested of Laski.