There were generous obituaries last week for the historian Eric Hobsbawm — frog spawn, as I always thought of him — who died on October 1, aged 95. The Times devoted two pages to a survey of his long life, a signal honour it rarely accords. In it I noticed one good joke and one badly written sentence that ought not to have been printed.
The joke touched on Hobsbawm’s long-time allegiance to communism, which persisted long after others of his sort had their eyes opened to the murderous regime of Uncle Joe by the invasion of Hungary in 1956. “When asked if he was still a member, he would say ‘yes, but very still’.”
Here is the messy sentence: “The Age of Extremes was one of those books which are truly seminal, in that they shape the thinking of all who read it.”
See the fault? It’s that final ‘it’. This is one of those sentences (this is another) that poses (pose?) a problem about whether you go for a singular or a plural verb to follow ‘one of those’.
I once discussed this very question with Sir Michael Dummett, the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University and an authority on grammar (about which he wrote a very useful book designed for undergraduates). He, incidentally, was another notably left-wing academic. His verdict was that singular and plural verbs are equally acceptable. The important thing, though, is consistency. So the obituary writer, having opted for plural, should have concluded with ‘all who read them’.
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