Wronged and wrong
Sir: Many of your readers, having digested two columns of my undiluted praise (Books, 13 March) of the Honourable Lady Maclean's starred and famously 'vaut le detour' cuisine, must have been shocked to find that King Olav of Norway had died, presumably of a surfeit of it, 'just after a tete-a-tete lunch for which she had bought a pretty new hat'. But what I actually wrote, before some proof-reading terrorist got at the typescript, was that the late monarch `died on her just after proposing a tete-a- tete lunch . . . ', a very different kettle of North Sea fish, if I may so put it. I should perhaps add that, having regard to the fact that Lady Maclean had, in pur- suit of her 'Royal Quest', put a girdle round the earth, a fact attested to by my refer- ences to, for example, Jordan, Japan, Tonga and Malaysia, I was rather surprised to see on your cover the claim that I was to be found within writing only of 'the crowned heads of Europe'. An advertisement prominently displayed in the 13 March issue of the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that shares with your magazine the same Canadian owner- ship, made your offence more gratuitously vile by including the line, 'Alastair Forbes, on his friends, the crowned heads of Europe'.
It so happens that not one of my friends, of whom I am still lucky enough to possess quite a few of both sexes, is a 'crowned head of Europe'. In my review of Crowned Heads, A Royal Quest, the only friends of mine I mentioned at all were its author, Veronica Maclean, her husband Sir Fitzroy, her late brother Hugh Fraser and his moth- er-in-law Lady Longford, along with Lords Bonham Carter and Charteris of Amisfield.
Alastair Forbes
Chateau D'Oex, Switzerland
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