I was struck by Neil Tennant’s story (Diary, 23 May) about a message in a séance spelling out to a group of teenagers ‘My dear children, you are so young. Do not make my mistake. — Oscar Wilde.’ It reminded me of that passage in G.K. Chesterton’s Autobiography, where, having fallen into a period of dark nihilism at the Slade School of Art, he too had experimented with the planchette, which spelled out in its deceptive banality: ‘Orriblerevelationsinighlife’.
For two or three weeks now we have been reading orrible revelations in the Daily Telegraph. Should these be denominated revelations, disclosures or exposés? The Telegraph’s chosen tag is ‘The Expenses Files’. The information came from two million bits of paper — receipts for ginger biscuits and the like — stored, we are told, on a computer hard-drive.
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