CLASSICAL CORNER

BARRY BALDWIN

296: PRINCESSES OF WAILS Although a devout republican, I feel sorry for Kate. Not only, of course, for her illness but for the ridiculous hysteria that greeted her family photograph. Photographers amateur and professional regularly edit their snaps. Why the devil not? All this nonsense about conspiracies, based on a child’s misaligned hands, puts me in mind of this epigram by Thomas Babington Macaulay: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” And editing photos evokes Jane Austen remarking that she “lop’t and crop’t” Pride and Prejudice. The ancients, of course, had no photos to edit. Their version was in Roman terms known as Damnatio Memoriiæ, meaning the chiselling out of a predecessor’s name from inscriptions, thus appropriating his/her achievements,…

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Fortean Times (Digital) - 1 Issue, 444

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