Spectator's Notebook
ALBANY, in the Sunday Telegraph, has now an- nounced that he is Kenneth Rose, and adds that 'Quoodle of the Spectator leaves a careless trail of clues which makes me sus- pect he prefers at heart to be called lain Macleod.' Fair enough, except for the fact that I announced my pen-name in the paper when I adopted it. But surely there is another point. Certainly in daily papers and usually in weeklies, a column is as much a department of the paper as any other, and many people con- tribute to it. I had assumed this to be the case with the Albany column, and am surprised to learn it is the work of one man. For myself, the reason why I use a pen-name (even one that is so openly identified) is because sometime a short paragraph on foreign affairs or a notice of a book or brief comment on cabbages and kings can be tucked into the Quoodle column. I don't always write these myself. But checking back over the last hundred paragraphs that have appeared over the pen-name Quoodle, I find I wrote eighty-one of them, and contributed to four or five more. It would be intriguing to have com- parable statistics for other columnists.
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