Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Those Funny Squiggles
Ben Cooke, "Eric Griffiths obituary," The Times (November 13 2018):
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Eric Griffiths, like Dante, believed the fraudulent belong in a lower circle of Hell than thieves, adulterers, heretics and murderers, as his more conceited students soon found out. Cutting through their grandiloquent chatter, their bons mots and pretensions to have read more than they actually had, he would take to his feet and expose, one by one, every error in their reasoning. He impressed on them that their oversight of a particular nuance in a poem was not only an intellectual failure, but a moral one, akin to ignoring what someone has to say.Hat tip: Alan Crease.
[....]
Likewise he was banned from interviewing applicants to Trinity in 1998 after telling 17-year-old Tracy Playle not to bother with the ancient Greek in a line of TS Eliot because "being from Essex, you don't know what those funny squiggles are".
