Competition | 23 January 2010

In Competition No. 2630 you were invited to imagine that a literary giant of the pre-television age is guest TV critic on The Spectator, and submit an extract from his or her review.

As Emma Woodhouse says, ‘One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.’ So what would the literary greats of the past have thought of 21st-century viewing habits; what, I wonder, would Miss Austen herself have made of a dripping Colin Firth emerging from the lake at Pemberley in a telly adaptation of Pride and Prejudice?
In a small but impressive entry, the poets were in...