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So, if you worked on the Evening Mail, fancy sharing a pint or two, filling the gaps in those fading memories and remembering some fun days on the


writer’. They may be vital qualities for the writers of a certain fictive style of popular entertainment but, if all artistic works had been written to the conceptually limiting formula of such enterprises, there would have been no important art. The great literary works confront a


Mail patch in Slough, Hounslow, Staines or Uxbridge, get in contact with: Rick Evans (pictured above left with Paul Erlam): rick.m.evans@ btopenworld.com; Peter Brown: onepeterbrown@hotmail.com or Jeff Wright: jeffrey.wright@virgin.net for a Windsor pub reunion in June. Jeffrey Wright Hampshire


Ignore market demands that stifle great art Whether restless news journalists are advantageously positioned to write bestselling novels (From fact to fiction, March/April) is a question that was hardly settled by the careers of Dickens and Orwell, but certainly gains more traction in the era of topical thrillers intended for TV adaptation. In any case, the premise on which this is founded is aesthetically threadbare. Journalists, declares Sandra Ireland,


‘have to understand prevailing trends and the needs of the marketplace, which are also vital qualities for the fiction


faulty world with the imaginative evidence of its injustices and frailties, and were not written with the publisher’s balance-sheet in mind. A novel written to a commercial template is less a novel than a sales campaign. ‘Some [journalists] find harnessing the imagination to summon up ideas on demand can be difficult,’ Lynne Wallis reports. Perhaps the problem lies in the exercise of raking the barren ground for elusive ‘ideas’. Stuart Walton Torquay


Kudos for fiction feature but check the captions Thank you for Lynne Wallis’s fascinating feature ‘From fact to fiction’ (March/ April). Kudos to Lynne for an eye- catching subject: the ambition to write a novel, which, as Lynne rightly points out, appeals to so many journalists I know. (Kudos too to my Financial Times colleague Francesca Jakobi, whose excellent novel Bitter was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson last year). Lynne’s piece was enjoyable, well


researched and had insightful quotes. However, there were a couple of errors. The most glaring was the headshot of Tom Wolfe labelled ‘Martin Amis’. Also,


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Ruth Addicott (@RuthAddicott ) Press trips, photo shoots & poolside selfies – Is travel journalism in crisis? My article in The Journalist https://bit.ly/2F5czpF @mschrisbuckley #journalism #influencers #travelbloggers


Rachel Broady (@RachelBroady) Replying to @RuthAddicott @mschrisbuckley I used this in a seminar the other day. The publication timing couldn’t have been better for me!


Patrick McFall (@PatMcFall) Good to see #JillyCooper sticking up for scribblers in @mschrisbuckley’s the Journalist mag


Sandra Ireland’s novel Bone Deep was referred to in the caption as her second but in the story as her third. It’s a small error, but not one that will escape the sharp-eyed subeditors who make up much of your readership. Paul Gould Brighton


Toasting the bygone glory days of trebles all round Anyone reading between the lines of the Hugh McIlvanney obit could probably guess the Observer’s star sports scribe liked a glass or two. I learned this for a fact when I was at Punch (RIP) and


Miles Kington commissioned a review from him for our books pages. After some weeks without any sign of Hugh or his copy, Miles set out on his bike for the paper’s sports desk to extract it from the errant reviewer, only to be told that they couldn’t find him either. It turned out that Hugh had just received his monthly expenses in folding cash and consequently couldn’t be seen for dust. (For younger readers: those were the happy days when people used to drink during office hours – and papers paid expenses. Ed.) Jonathan Sale London


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