Bought on Friday and spent the weekend going over it.
By and large I'm a fan of Maconie's and how he makes complex times and events much more accessible to someone who, like me, doesn't benefit from being particularly high-minded. But as with a lot of his books, the editing really does seem to have been incredibly lax.
In Pies and Prejudice, he referred to Liverpool beating Inter Milan in the 2005 Champions League final. The People's Songs was filled with sundry other minor gaffes and now this seems to have just had someone press Spellcheck and consider the work of the editor done. It's not so much the little things that slip through, like the missing 'g' in Bigg Market, but writing about how the museum in Mansfield has a 'Made In Macclesfield' section that he then describes as being full of artefacts from Mansfield.
He writes about wanting to find a pub in which to watch Chelsea vs Liverpool on Sky on 23 October 2016. I took his word on this, it barely registering who Bury played over this weekend, never mind two of the biggest clubs in the country. Yet within a couple of paragraphs containing a reference to Pedro scoring for Chelsea, he's referred to 'the Sky Sports panel [beginning] a prolonged debate about Jose Mourinho who is pictured sulking, bottom lip thrust out like a toddler' and it dawned on me that Chelsea were actually playing Manchester United.
I like your work Stuart, but please - let's be a bit more careful, eh?
By and large I'm a fan of Maconie's and how he makes complex times and events much more accessible to someone who, like me, doesn't benefit from being particularly high-minded. But as with a lot of his books, the editing really does seem to have been incredibly lax.
In Pies and Prejudice, he referred to Liverpool beating Inter Milan in the 2005 Champions League final. The People's Songs was filled with sundry other minor gaffes and now this seems to have just had someone press Spellcheck and consider the work of the editor done. It's not so much the little things that slip through, like the missing 'g' in Bigg Market, but writing about how the museum in Mansfield has a 'Made In Macclesfield' section that he then describes as being full of artefacts from Mansfield.
He writes about wanting to find a pub in which to watch Chelsea vs Liverpool on Sky on 23 October 2016. I took his word on this, it barely registering who Bury played over this weekend, never mind two of the biggest clubs in the country. Yet within a couple of paragraphs containing a reference to Pedro scoring for Chelsea, he's referred to 'the Sky Sports panel [beginning] a prolonged debate about Jose Mourinho who is pictured sulking, bottom lip thrust out like a toddler' and it dawned on me that Chelsea were actually playing Manchester United.
I like your work Stuart, but please - let's be a bit more careful, eh?
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