By a sad coincidence, last week I said that the headline “Foot heads arms body” was probably apocryphal. Not at all. I have since heard from Martyn Cornell, who was a subeditor on the Times around 1986. He had to handle a story about Michael Foot being put in charge of a committee to look at nuclear disarmament in Europe, or something similar. The headline was to be in largish type, but across a single column – always a problem for subs. “I certainly wasn’t going to get ‘nuclear’ or ‘disarmament’ or ‘committee’ to fit, so after a struggle I decided on ‘Foot chairs arms body’, then thought ‘Foot heads arms body’ would at least give a laugh to the revise sub. To my astonishment, the headline was printed, and a legend was born …” Andrew Kyle remembers a vogue for making longer and longer headlines from the same base. “Assuming Foot had become PM, and had discovered that his defence secretary had approved the bullying tactics of the National Front, the headline could have been ‘Foot knows arms body head backs front muscle’.
– Footnotes to a life well lived | From the Guardian | The GuardianDimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.
