Peter Fleming
Sir: My old friend Christopher Sykes has got it wrong. Peter Fleming's Oxford career was sufficiently brilliant (President of the OUDS, Editor of the Isis, a First in English), but I doubt whether he was ever a member of the Union: certainly he was never President. His interest in politics was nonexistent, rather than "superficial,"
I am sorry too that Christopher didn't mention Peter's long connection with The Spectator — first as Moth and latterly as Strix — a connection which wag' almost severed at the very beginning, when he incurred the wrath of the editor Wilson Harris by writing: It Is the proud boast of the editorial staff that no two issues of the Spectator have ever been proved identical. Sometimes it is the phraseology that is different, sometimes the order or titles of the articles are changed. If the same thing is said, it is said in a different way. If the same words are used, they are used of something else. That has always been the tradition. If not variety, then at least divergence. Semper idem, sed nunquam verbatim.
Rupert Hart-Davis The Old Rectory, Marske-inSwaledale, Richmond, Yorks
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