In the first volume of his memoirs, In Time of Trouble, Claude Cockburn described his introduction to The Times of the 1930s, on a visit to its foreign desk. There he found one sub-editor reciting Plato’s Phaedo from memory, while another translated it into Chinese: they had a bet it could not be done without loss of nuance. Another sub-editor, a grammarian of Polynesian previously employed as a ... (read more)