“Yes, we must listen to experts, but which ones?” (Comment, last week, page 36) attributed the idea that Britain has had enough of experts to Michael Gove. The full quote from Gove was, in fact: “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”
A feature headlined “Our daily helping of fear and loathing” (New Review,last week, page 8) said: “Those [Daily Mail] front pages have something of the shape of the opening pages of Great Expectations… sparked by a coastguard’s interception of a boat of 18 Albanian asylum seekers off the coast of Dickens’s Romney Marsh.” Romney Marsh is on the borders of southernmost Kent and East Sussex. The marshes Dickens features in Great Expectations are east of Gravesend, by the Thames in north Kent, his childhood haunt.
“From Amiens to the Elysée in 13 months” (World News, last week, page 25) said Emmanuel Macron would be France’s eighth president. Not exactly. Macron is the eighth president of the French Fifth Republic, ie the eighth since 1958.
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
