Mind your language, Mr Rawnsley

The weekend press offered some rave reviews of Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography. Craig Brown, who is not given to hyperbole, compared Moore’s book to a work of art, while the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley praised Moore’s ‘multi-dimensional portrait’ of the person we know as Mrs Thatcher. There were, however, some reservations. Rawnsley, brave man that he is, criticised Moore’s usage:

‘Moore is a patrician Old Etonian and a High Tory. So another of his challenges is to make the empathetic leap necessary to get inside the head of a grammar school girl who was born over a shop in Grantham. He makes a decent stab at it, but can’t always resist lapsing into pedantic snobbery. Quoting letters in which she writes “he and I”, he adds a lordly “[sic]” to tell the reader that he knows, as the young Thatcher did not, that this is not strict grammar. One is therefore very surprised to find this old stickler for the English language using spellings that many consider vulgarly American: “realized” for “realised”, “organize” for “organise”, “privatization” for “privatisation”.’