TAYLOR SWIFT vs. CHARLES DICKENS

Sometimes editorials take on a life of their own. I was recently at a lunch when the topic of sound came up and one of the diners mentioned that his son had given him a sound system for his birthday. ‘I couldn’t get it to work,’ he said. ‘And when he: I even had my opening sentence prepared: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ … nicked from Charles Dickens of course (the opening lines to his novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’) but if such theft was condoned by none other than T. S. Eliot, who am I to argue? (I learned only recently that Eliot always insisted on using both his initials, rather than just the one, simply because he couldn’t bear what his name became when spelled backwards without the middle initial.)