A caption last week claimed a photograph of the spy Guy Burgess was taken in Moscow on New Year’s Day, 1961. The fact that he was wearing an open-necked, short-sleeved shirt and standing in bright sunshine next to a tree in leaf suggests otherwise. We blindly followed an incorrect date attached to the picture (“How secret dispatches from Moscow cast fresh light on a charming dictator”, In Focus, last week, page 30).
Our TV review last week said Henning Mankell had a bleak ending planned for his character Wallander, “written while the author himself was dying”. However, Mankell was not diagnosed with cancer until 2014, five years after his final Wallander book, The Troubled Man, was published. He died in 2015 (“Mystery of a wandering Wallander”, New Review, last week, page 28).
Food and drink corner: contrary to “Loosening the old school Thai” (Magazine, 22 May, page 46) the Smoking Goat Thai restaurant in Denmark Street, London, is now run solely by Ben Chapman; and the Horticultural Trades Association will be holding its seventh catering conference this month – not its first (“A potted azalea, a rake … and two of the monkfish livers, please”, News, 22 May, page 7).
Write to Stephen Pritchard, Readers’ Editor, the Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, email observer.readers@observer.co.uk tel 020 3353 4656
