Readers of The Spectator may remember the 2021 defenestration of author and teacher Kate Clanchy, which saw her part company with her publisher Pan Macmillan. This was after whole extracts of her award-winning book Some Children I Taught and What They Taught Me were slated for rewriting, more or less at the behest of a Twitter mob.
Clanchy, in her book, had described one student’s ‘almond eyes’, another’s ‘chocolate skin’ and a third’s ‘fine Ashkenazi nose’. For this she was viciously lambasted by three fellow writers and – barely believably – compared by one of them to Nazi eugenicists. Recalling the episode soon afterwards, Clanchy, who lost both parents that same year, wrote in Prospect of the suicidal feelings that followed: ‘in the bathroom, telling me to reach for the razor blade; by the side of the road, telling me to walk into the traffic; in the river while I was swimming…’ To UnHerd, she said simply, ‘This is my actual life’s work – everything that I’ve always worked for, it has actually been taken away.
