20 SEPTEMBER 1935, Page 6

Purity of language is at all times to be approved.

But the ethical distinction between d and damn has always seemed to me a little fine. And when Sir Austen Chamberlain writes in his new volume of memoirs " Of course I know The Times d—d it next day and it did not look very easy. But my father has been d—d by The Times more than once and has got over it," I can't help wondering whether Mr. Joseph Chamber- lain himself would have thought it necessary to be quite so tender-tongued. * *