![]() If there was a golden age of flawless journalism – something occasionally claimed by wistful readers – it exists mostly in the imagination. He is, we are glad to say, still in farily good health.” Ninety years later, an article that referred to gay and lesbian people serving in the armed forces noted how the admiral of the fleet, Peter Hill-Norton, had “gone a little quiet on the subject”. On 24 February 1914, the newspaper hurried to set the record straight: “In a report of yesterday’s Devon and Cornwall dinner, Mr C W Provis was referred to as ‘the late’ Mr Provis. This is not the place to relive the worst of them, and thankfully they have been rare, but suffice to say a category of mistake that engenders particular pain and regret concerns purported life or death. All newspapers occasionally make serious errors, the prompt and prominent correction of which matters not only to those misrepresented but also for the accrual of trust among readers in general. The chief aim of listing corrections is not, of course, mirth. In 2007 it blushed: “We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26.” Sometimes the red pen must take itself to task. “ should have been the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit,” deadpanned the next day’s corrections column. If further proof were needed of the havoc one missing letter can produce, among the highlights expected at Glastonbury 2010 was the group Frightened Rabbi. Anyone spluttering over their morning muesli at this point might have reached for Glaxo’s “controversial treatment for irritable bowl syndrome”, as we once had it. Readers were informed that the 2003 spring season at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon would feature “The Taming of the Screw”. We had a rather agile George Formby standing on a lamp-post, rather than leaning on one, in August 2002, which was around the same time we referred to a Miles Davis album as Sketches of Pain (when Spain was meant). ![]() Thus we can recall how an April 1998 obituary declared the show that turned Joan Heal into a star was Grab Me a Gondolier (it should have read Grab Me a Gondola ), while four months later the finance pages reported a £250,000 advance for Vikram Seth’s new novel, “A Suitable Buy”.
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