Rose Wild

London Bridge

Archive Editor at The Times

I'm the Archive Editor of The Times, digging up bits of weird history from 1785 to the present day

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Articles

We take science seriously but we can still be silly

Nov 22, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

Professor David Norman is exasperated. “The Times is fortunate to have, in Tom Whipple and Rhys Blakely, two of the best science writers of any British newspaper. Whether the subject is the magnetic pole or mammoth DNA, they write informative articles that elicit some interesting additional comments from readers online.”All good, so far. “But,” he goes on, “why do articles about science also attract silly comments from people who know nothing about the subject and spoil it for the rest of us?
Chivalry is not the business of style editors

Nov 15, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

Grace Gillions of Hitchin, Herts, is not a fan of our style when it comes to honorifics, especially when we refer to people by their surnames alone after the first mention. She “raged”, she says, “when a recent column referred to the late Duchess of Windsor as ‘Simpson’ which, whatever her reputation, was unnecessarily disrespectful.”The issue of respect crops up whenever this subject is raised.
Biblical grammar can be odd: that’s the gospel truth

Nov 1, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

Some readers of this column have made a life’s work of scrutinising our pages for supposed solecisms — or keeping us up to scratch, as they’d no doubt put it. Now Huw James has raised the pastime to a new level, although, thankfully, this time the infelicity is not ours. “There is a grammatical error in Tuesday’s Bible quotation in the Hatch, Match and Dispatch section of the Register,” he writes. “It reads, ‘Whom say ye that I am?’ The whom and the I both refer to Christ and are both nominative.
Dash it all - he’s got a point about my comma habit

Oct 25, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

Time for some self-criticism, as Chairman Mao used to say. Peter Gilbert has written to pick holes in my use of punctuation. “You said last week that The Times has been dispensing with unnecessary commas and aspires to clutter its prose with as little punctuation as possible. This is all fine, but what is the status of the long dash? In this single article you have used a pair of them twice in place of brackets or commas. You’ve also used one where a full stop or colon would have made sense.
Sorry, Harold, we seem to overlook 1066 and all that

Oct 18, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

Antony Hurden has written from Bury St Edmunds to point out that we’ve been missing an important anniversary.
Simply useful for parlour games or really quite vital?

Oct 11, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

Dianne Page has written from the West Midlands to propose a society to save the adverb. She’d like to be the first member, she says, or join one if it already exists. I don’t know of such a thing, but why not? Apart from writing to the newspapers, perhaps members could get together for Dionysian evenings of playing the adverb parlour game.
Mick Jagger could rest easy with Havers brothers’ homage

Oct 4, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

In last week’s Saturday Review Nigel Farndale revived the story of the 1967 drugs raid on Keith Richards’s house in West Wittering, and The Times’s subsequent role in getting Richards’s and Mick Jagger’s prison sentences overturned. Their original trial was in Chichester, where the Festival Theatre is now staging a dramatisation, entitled Redlands.
From Cable Street to Southport, some things don’t change

Aug 9, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

Two days after the violent confrontation between police and anti-fascist demonstrators known as the Battle of Cable Street, in 1936, an unemployed labourer, Cyril Broadhead, pleaded not guilty to throwing a brick at a police inspector.
This may be only a fine point, but let’s home in on it

Aug 2, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

An email from Tony Pagan this week raised two points, one intentionally and one not. To start with, he wrote from Marbella to say how annoyed he gets when “only” is wrongly placed in a sentence. “Only,” he says, “should feature adjacent to whatever is unique, but it rarely does. Misplaced, it can sometimes distort the meaning.” If doctors, for example, were “only seeing 25 patients each day”, a pedant might wonder why they couldn’t find anything to do with the rest of their time.
Bernard Levin’s handshake game is ripe for a return

Jul 26, 2024 | thetimes.com | Rose Wild

Charlotte Soares wrote to ask if we could help her find a series of letters that she remembers reading in her parents’ copies of The Times. It was back, she thought, in the 1960s, and “people wrote in about contacts between themselves and historical figures.