Miss Whitehorn Whirling Those of us who read Katharine Whitehorn's
fortnightly article at least four times before you fall on it—once in typescript, once in galley, once in page proof, and finally when the paper comes off the machine—need no convincing of its lasting qualities. Sounds of pleasure have been heard from the sub-editor on duty at the printer's —a rare thing. The essay designed to give pleasure seemed as dead as the dodo before she revived it at a sparkling stroke in the back pages of the Spectator. There is no one to touch her at the spinning of this most difficult kind of prose. How does she do it? In his preface to the collection just published by Methuen at 21s. (under the title of Roundabout, of course), her husband describes how 'it means staying up on a Monday night jumping from typewriter to scissors and paste to the telephone to plead with the editor or assistant editor of the Spectator that couldn't the copy be delivered after lunch on Tuesday just once?' Hard writing, easy read- ing. But in fact I believe that her copy quite often comes in on a Monday. And that, in the eyes of editors and assistant editors and such- like, is the crowningest of all crowning virtues in a journalist, even one who looks as good as her copy.
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