12 March 2005

Last year there was one Classics Cup on offer. This year there are no fewer than three: one for the Open competition (any 200-word piece from The Spectator in Latin or Greek prose or verse); one for undergraduates (200 words in Latin or Greek on the theme ‘Tony and Gordon’); and one for school pupils

In Competition No. 2382 you were invited to supply pretentious ‘intellectual’ tosh in the form of a review of a play, book, film or piece of classical music. Back in 1990 that grand old comper Roger Woddis sent me a wonderful specimen of pseudocrap perpetrated by James Wolcott in the Observer. It deserves some space: