There would appear to be a rather high incidence of error in pronouncements on literary matters from John Sutherland, the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College London and a popular media pundit.

A few weeks ago in this column I drew attention to his opinion, offered in an explanatory note in the OUP’s World Classics edition of Anthony Trollope’s Old Man’s Love, that it was “unusual for [Trollope] to use a real place name” (as he did in this book). It was strange, then, I commented, that the two other Trollopes I had just read, An Eye for an Eye and The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, were both similarly exact in their depiction of place.

Now I find Sutherland taken to task in the letters column of The Times for his assertion, in an article for the Thunderer, that “there are no pregnant women in the whole of Shakespeare’s drama”. Will Cudmore wrote that this was a “very odd claim” when “The Winter’s Tale opens with a visibly expectant Hermione and the plot hinges on the disputed paternity of her unborn daughter”. He also cited All’s Well That Ends Well and Love’s Labour’s Lost which end with Helena and Jaquenetta, respectively, pregnant.

The next day, Marjorie Trusted wrote: “To the list . . . I would add Juliet in Measure for Measure. The plot turns on her pregnancy.”

Ought it to be made a punishable offence in academia to demean the status of professorships through egregious error?