Monday, December 01, 2003

Max Hastings has an endearing love of embarrassment, even if his. To judge by Editor, his memoir of running the Daily Telegraph, he also has a favourite way of describing it.
"Mrs Thatcher, Bernard Ingham and I sat down to a frosty and attenuated tete-a-tete" (p60); "Our dinner table at the Relai was liberally coated with frost" (p67); "The occasion ended, as it began, with several inches of ice on the table" (p110. Shall we stop now?).
Things do become a little smugger as he settles into the job, but there is still scarcely a dining table mentioned that couldn't double as a skating rink.
[Editor, by Max Hastings, Macmillan, 2002. Also interesting in what it refuses to talk about.]

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