4 JANUARY 1997, Page 24

Self-correction

Sir: I should like to make three additions or corrections to my review The Oxford Book of Political Quotations (14/21 December). First, Harold Wilson said . . I am going on' at a May Day rally at the Festival Hall in 1969, not at the party con- ference. Second, Evelyn Waugh wrote 'I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants' in a pre-election symposium in The Spectator of 2 October 1959 rather than in a letter to the Times. And, third, I did not rely on my memory for Lord Beaverbrook's advice to Tom Driberg on wearing a hat. Instead I had consulted not Driberg's Ruling Passions but his if anything even more aptly enti- tled The Best of Both Worlds, published 24 years previously. There Beaverbrook's words are as I recorded them in Brief Lives: 'The British electors will not vote for a man who doesn't wear a hat.'

Alan Watkins

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