A glaring omission would appear to have been made in a new book about the 70-year history of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. At least it has if the contents of Mitchell Symons’s Desert Island Discs: Flotsam and Jetsam (Bantam Press, £14.99) were adequately reflected in a two-page summary this week in the Mail On Sunday.

In a highlighted section headed “Those who chose their own work” we were told of, among others, Barbara Windsor picking herself performing the theme song of the film Sparrows Can’t Sing and Max Bygraves going for his You’re a Pink Toothbrush. But where was Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf?

She was the guest who in 1958 notoriously chose all eight discs from her own recordings. This set a standard of egomania unrivalled down the years. Can Symons really have left this out of his book? Perhaps the Mail On Sunday’s sub-editors didn’t spot the reference, or were fearful they might misspell Schwarzkopf.

Mention of the sub-editors prompts me to wonder how long they will continue to operate under the bizarre house style rule that forces them to ‘cap up’ all the insignificant words in every title save their own. Thus it is always ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ and ‘The Wind In The Willows’ — among the favourite books of Desert Island Discs castaways — but never anything other than the Mail on Sunday. (I choose to reverse the rule.) The MOS’s new(ish) editor Geordie Greig is a sensible and civilised chap — as I have known since his days as a student at St Peter’s College, Oxford. It is time for him to bring an end to this nonsense.

In the odd way these things happen in life (at least to me, serendipitously in terms of column-writing), I had been thinking of diva Dame Elisabeth’s date with Roy Plomley just before reading the MOS article.

This arose as a consequence of hearing a radio programme featuring another ‘opera singer’ — as she is often referred to, though she has yet to appear in an opera.

“She’s out to do a Schwarzkopf,” I said to Rosemarie over lunch as we heard the somewhat uncertain debut of Katherine Jenkins as a presenter on Classic FM. Christmas at Katherine’s — the station’s website had told us — would be a three-hour programme of “her favourite Christmas music”.

The preview writer could find no room, however, to inform us that quite a lot of these favourites would be from her own oeuvre. Her new CD Katherine Jenkins: This is Christmas was well showcased in her choices. Among them was a perky version of Eartha Kitt’s Santa Baby (how ‘classic’ is that?) and a contrastingly dirge-like account of the carol Away in a Manger.

The second composition sparked off an entertaining correspondence in the Daily Telegraph last week after the Cambridge classicist (and telly personality) Mary Beard commented on its “weird” words. “What actually does ‘no crib for a bed’ mean?” she had asked in an article the Times Literary Supplement. (The confusion rises because in America, where the carol was written in the late 19th century by the prolific Anon, crib means both a feeding frame for cattle and a baby’s cradle.) In a comment on another carol in the Telegraph on Saturday, a correspondent asked: “Where exactly is Orientar?” echoing a question I have long asked.

A church music poser that stumped me as a boy was what a green hill far away could possibly want with a city wall and why it should be a matter for comment that it did not have one. In modern versions of the Easter hymn the eminence is usually said to be ‘outside’ the wall At a same period of my life a silly pun often drifted into my head while I was singing another hymn. I will give a clue: “In a way comparable to which dull piece of electrical apparatus might our Saviour’s reliability be said to be demonstrated?”

Easy-peasy, I think. But something to ponder over the festive break. Answer next week. A merry Christmas.