Rupert Read visited this site today and politely pointed out that my statement in a previous entry that he was Balliol JCR President during my time at that college was bollocks (my word, not his). This entry is by way of apology to him and to all readers of this ‘Blog. He was right: as a result of lazy Googling by me, I confused him with someone else. There are worse libels, and he didn’t ask me to do this, but, as is my policy, I’ve corrected my mistake and the correction will, eventually percolate through Google’s cache too. I still don’t agree with him about much else, though.
UPDATE: In a spectacular display of grace on his part (I am starting to feel seriously ashamed now) Rupert has just sent me a very nice private email and I am tempted to take up the academic offer he made in it.
Thanks for posting this, Damian; I appreciate what you say here.
I hope we can have some useful dialogue about the issues we have begun discussing. I still have some reservations about an online discussion about these matters; I am anxious to avoid the kind of ‘discussion’ undertaken by Oliver Kamm. His attack on me (an attack that you praised) — an attack I thought to be small, and intellectually disreputable — upset me, and left me feeling more uncertain than I had ever been about entering even slightly into the seemingly sometimes very unpleasant world of e-discussion.
But perhaps we can buck the trend.
Best,
Rupert