1. EL Gazette were typically quick to pick up on this one from Cambridge Assessment, Can you answer a 110-year-old exam question? https://www.elgazette.com/can-you-answer-a-110-year-old-exam-question/ Cambridge have been kind enough to supply me with the answers, and here they are:

a. is a split infinitive, so would have been considered wrong. Most of us now think it’s fine, although it’s best to avoid it in very formal writing – the answer they were looking for is ‘seriously to improve’, but this sounds very old fashioned.

b. is a so-called hanging participle and is still considered wrong. The best way to say it would be ‘Shakespeare is by no means inferior to Aeschylus’, although this is also quite old fashioned; we would say ‘not at all’.

c. the tenses are wrong – it should be ‘to make peace’

d. We are not quite sure how they thought about this 110 years ago, but ‘would admit’ is probably what they were looking for.

e and f are correct.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that the examiners at the time might have required more of an answer than ‘this sentence is correct’ for (e) and (f), as the question rubric asks the candidate to ‘correct or justify four of the following sentences, giving your reasons’, which rather implies that they felt that (e) and (f) would need justifying, doesn’t it? Here’s the original Cambridge piece, with a little more background https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/news/view/110-years-of-cambridge-english-exams/

2. A splendid collection from The Conversation, Windrush 75, rounding off a month of commemoration of the arrival at Tilbury Docks in London of HMT Empire Windrush seventy-five years ago  https://theconversation.com/download-our-latest-e-book-75-years-of-windrush-208217 PDF below, just in case that’s easier.

HMT = His Majesty’s Troopship, and here’s a potted history of the ship, which I’d no idea had been captured from Germany during World War 2 http://www.kingsownmuseum.com/galleryship021.htm

3. Stephen Downes of OLDaily recommends this nine-instalment series by Leon Furze on ‘the many complex ethical concerns well worth discussing with our students’ that artificial intelligence presents https://leonfurze.com/ai-ethics/

4. Hope this works: here’s a ‘saved search’ of all the online events at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, for which the Festival ask that you pay whatever you’re able to pay: https://tinyurl.com/hvnw385w Don’t pay if you can’t afford to; do pay, if you can!

5. And, finally, for one week only, the short story Careful by Raymond Carver, courtesy of The Paris Review https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/3062/careful-raymond-carver