My eye was caught, as the odd saying goes, by a letter in the Daily Telegraph on Monday from Count Nikolai Tolstoy. Its content was interesting (the suggestion that David Cameron might be hoping eventually for an EU job in Brussels) but the address he gave perhaps more so: “Southmoor, Berkshire.”
Now Southmoor has since 1974 been part of Oxfordshire, as the count well knows. I rehearsed the matter at some length in this column almost exactly two years ago when The Times printed the ‘Berkshire’ address in a marriage announcement for his daughter.
While it is all very well for Tolstoy to hanker for things the way they were, it is unfair of him to encourage our leading newspapers of record to promulgate an error in this way.
I direct him once more to an observation of the best known of his family, novelist Leo Tolstoy. He wrote (in Anna Karenina): “There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone about him.”
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