Life and letters

Even as the Christmas season draws in upon us, the academy’s best-loved post-foxhunting bloodsport — pointing out scholarly inadequacies in the new Dictionary of National Biography — continues. The latest and most eye-stretchingly savage instance comes from Nikolai Tolstoy, in a letter prominently published in the TLS. He complains that in August 2002 he was contacted for help by an in-house DNB scribe who had been commissioned to write the entry for his stepfather, the historical novelist Patrick O’Brian. Tolstoy — who was working on his own full-length biography, and knew that O’Brian had taken several liberties with the facts of his own life over the years — asked his interlocutor starchily ‘what were his qualifications for writing on a subject of whose most basic rudiments he was confessedly ignorant’. The answer did not give satisfaction, and he went on to contact the DNB’s editor who, he claims, refused to reveal the name of the writer, and ‘cavalierly rejected my misgivings’. Tolstoy now reports (he is not a man, we conclude, who you would in any circumstances want on your case) that the eventual DNB entry is ‘so replete with factual errors that it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that barely a biographical detail is correct’. He offers a ‘specimen selection of solecisms’ 17 items long. Yikes. The authors of the entry, incidentally, were Tim Wales and Bill Peschel. O’Brian is Peschel’s only entry to the DNB; Wales is credited with 16 contributions, including a thief, a highwayman, a public executioner and several Church of England clergymen.

To take our minds off mean old Nikolai Tolstoy and nasty old Patrick O’Brian and the slapdash old Dictionary of National Biography, let’s think instead of all that is good and lovely and nice. The Duchess of York — author, as countless fans will remember, of Budgie the Little Helicopter — has returned to the world of children’s literature.