The London Evening Standard last week published a polite corrective from the goddess Julie Burchill in response to some nonsense from her second ex-husband and Sunday Times film critic Cosmo Landesman. Alas, the original draft of the letter was somewhat less polite. Here it is:
"I was amused to read my former husband Cosmo Landesman's remark (Londoner's Diary) that I hadn't read a single book for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate literary prize I was recently honoured to be on the judging panel of - because, apparently, I have 'never read a book.'
"If the ignorant tool had not been such a dullard during our decade-long marriage then perhaps I would not have been so eager to finish off the complete works of Patrick Hamilton/Oscar Wilde/Graham Greene during many a numbing night. Didn't he notice? No, but then it took him two months to notice I'd run off with my teenage editorial assistant!
"Oddly unmoving though it is to have my literacy dissed by a man who writes English as though it is his third language, I would have expected him to have had more respect for the talented Jewish writers whose books I so thoroughly loved reading - especially for the late Fred Wander, whose breathtaking, heart-breaking account of the Holocaust, The Seventh Well, was the deserving winner."
"I was amused to read my former husband Cosmo Landesman's remark (Londoner's Diary) that I hadn't read a single book for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate literary prize I was recently honoured to be on the judging panel of - because, apparently, I have 'never read a book.'
"If the ignorant tool had not been such a dullard during our decade-long marriage then perhaps I would not have been so eager to finish off the complete works of Patrick Hamilton/Oscar Wilde/Graham Greene during many a numbing night. Didn't he notice? No, but then it took him two months to notice I'd run off with my teenage editorial assistant!
"Oddly unmoving though it is to have my literacy dissed by a man who writes English as though it is his third language, I would have expected him to have had more respect for the talented Jewish writers whose books I so thoroughly loved reading - especially for the late Fred Wander, whose breathtaking, heart-breaking account of the Holocaust, The Seventh Well, was the deserving winner."
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