On the Wight track

In one of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the attempts made by Oliver Sipperley, editor of the Mayfair Gazette, to inject some pep into the mag are hampered by poor old Sippy’s inability to ward off unwelcome contributions from his formidable prep school headmaster on recondite classical topics. I experienced not dissimilar difficulties when editing the Telegraph’s obituaries page as I was constantly being assured by the 2nd Viscount Camrose, the paper’s erstwhile deputy chairman, that one of his old sailing chums would make ‘a jolly good obit’ (though his brother, Lord Hartwell, always maintained that obits were a waste of...