Geoffrey Madan and the joy of ‘unusual articles’

In 1924 Geoffrey Madan retired, aged 29, and devoted himself to books. ‘A genius for friendship, selfless devotion to progressive causes, a deep and touching love of animals and of natural beauty – he would not have claimed for himself any of these so frequent attributes of the lately dead,’ said an obituary never published.

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Published 34 years posthumously, however, in 1981, were Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, a commonplace book edited by J.A. Gere and John Sparrow, with a foreword by his friend Harold Macmillan. One entry lists 17 lives in the Dictionary of National Biography ‘of interest and not usually read’, such as John Selby Watson (1804-84), ‘author and murderer’; John Nichols Tom (1799-1838), ‘impostor and madman’; or John Henderson (1757-88), ‘eccentric student’ who ‘withdrew from all social intercourse, abandoning himself to the study of Lavater’.

Surprisingly, Madan is not in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as it now calls itself, unlike his father Falconer Madan (deputy librarian at the Bodleian) or Martin Madan (Church of England clergyman and advocate of polygamy).

Last week my husband shouted from the next room while I was peeling potatoes that he had ‘discovered’ an article on Wikipedia called ‘Wikipedia: Unusual articles’. The unusual articles have a section on language, with a summary of Hitler’s attitude to Fraktur (Gothic-style) type against Antiqua (Roman-style) and information on Basque–Icelandic pidgin used by 17th-century whalers visiting Iceland (Christ Maria presenta for mi Balia, for mi, presenta for ju bustana – ‘If Christ and Mary give me a whale, I will give you the tail’).

Not so unusual, to me, is an article on capitalising internet.