HOWZAT

Pedant of the year

“When this most enjoyable book is reprinted, it would be worth correcting a few slips. The nickname ‘Tugboat Annie’ (because she moved from peer to peer) was not bestowed upon Mrs Ian Fleming but the Countess of Rosse (also unkindly dubbed ‘Lady Roscommon’). John Wayne was hardly “diminutive” (perhaps Heald was thinking of Alan Ladd?). ‘Debo’ Devonshire was not Mistress of the Robes; that was her mother-in-law, ‘Moucher’. The late Duke of Beaufort’s nickname of ‘Master’ did not allude to his Mastership of the Horse or of the Beaufort Hunt but — as he told me when I went to interview him about his memoirs, a work he had clearly not read, let alone written — went back to his boyhood, when he was given his own pack of harriers. And Billy Wallace was not an ‘Hon’. Such things mattered to HRH The Princess Margaret.”

Hugh Massingberd reviews Tim Heald’s biography of Princess Margaret, Literary Review

Most impressive act of lawless rebellion

“We arrived in Edinburgh at 4am on Wednesday. I have a flat in the city, but I was coming over for a showing of my short film, Nuts, at the Film Festival, so I thought I’d let them put me up in the Prestonfield hotel. It’s the best hotel in the world — there are peacocks strutting about on the lawns and you feel like you’re in the middle of the Highlands. I saw American indie film-maker John Waters on the golf course.”

Irvine Welsh, the Observer

Worst authorial choice of lover

“When Morton Fullerton met Edith Wharton in 1907, he had a potentially scandalous homosexual past, a French wife whom he had divorced with startling rapidity, a blackmailing mistress, in whose house he was still living (for convenience, not as a lover), and a frustrated career.”

From Hermione Lee’s life of Wharton

Least enthusiastic author

“Q: How much time, if any, do you spend on the web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?

Jenny Diski: Acres of time, wasted, wasted. I play poker (and lose), I play ludo and mah jong. I check out MetaFilter. I buy frocks. Anything. It’s a kind of hell. I sometimes think I might go back to typewriting. But you can’t get the ribbons.”

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