A Comment piece headlined “The photographs that moved the world to tears – and to take action” (last week, page 44) described the late photographer Chris Hondros’s visceral image of a five-year-old Iranian girl, Samar Hassan, in huge distress after the killing of her parents. Samar is Iraqi, not Iranian: the incident took place at a US checkpoint in Tal Afar, Iraq, in 2005.
An editing error muddled the chronology in “How Grace overcame Victorian snobs and family grief to break the sporting mould” (News, 30 August, page 20). We said the cricketer WG Grace was “already on the slide” at 34 and attributed the decline in part to compulsive gluttony, which we linked to unbearable sorrow at home. Grace was indeed devastated by the death of his daughter, but he was 51 when she died.
It would have been an achievement to reduce Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 3,600-page, six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle into a play that lasts 200 minutes, as we said last week – but in fact dramatist Ole Anders Tandberg has got it down even further, to 150 minutes. “‘Narrow-minded’ Sweden hails the stage version of acclaimed Norwegian novel” (News, last week, page 25).
Write to Stephen Pritchard, Readers’ Editor, the Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, email observer.readers@observer.co.uk or telephone 020 3353 4656
