Missing letter
Sir: Perhaps I may be permitted to preempt protest from any French person as surprised as I was by a quite false impression, created by the mysterious disappearance of a letter 't' from the word 'this' towards the end of the first paragraph of my review (11 March) of the Memoirs of Jean Monnet? I had been at pains to stress the 'ungratefully unrequited love of this country' (i.e. Great Britain) to which he had clung since boyhood, but, as printed by you, Sir, 'this' became `his' and thus Britain France.
No wonder a friend, reviving an old French literary simile, remarked to me the other day that he found the British Press 'comme une plage deserte, elle est si pleine de coquilles,' coquilles being also French for printers' errors.
Alastair Forbes, 1 837 Chateau D'Oex Vaud, Switzerland
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