I hardly spend my life attending dinner parties given by the chattering classes. But I will admit to attending dinners given by people who chatter – though not in the Hampstead/Islington fashion but more in the Tory manner, if it exists any more except in muddled gobbledegook. Most of these people have been scathing about
Dear Mary… Q. I rather prefer the use, however dated, of the English version of foreign place names, such as Leghorn, Peking and Bombay. I recently had occasion, in conversation, to refer to Majorca, whereupon my interlocutor pointedly (and from the point of view of clarity of meaning, needlessly) repeated the name, very elaborately, in
The sharp-eared Mr Keith Norman writes from Oxford with an observation that at first made me think our command of hypothetical constructions was breaking down. For Mr Norman notices people saying things like, ‘If I’d have known that…’. At first he wondered if I’d here stood for ‘I would/should’ or ‘I had’. Then he heard
