My wife, dutifully recycling newspapers at the weekend, thrust into my hand a copy of The Guardian’s listings magazine. pointing to the top right-hand corner of the cover.
“Look at that,” she said.

“Oh, they’ve spelt Saturday S-a-u-t-r-d-a-y,” I answered.

“What? I hadn’t noticed that. What I meant was that they’ve got Saturday down as May the 25th when it’s May the 26th. They’re useless, aren’t they?”

I didn’t agree. I’ve always admired them for at least having the courage to correct their cock-ups in their Corrections and Clarifications slot, which is, incidentally, one of the funniest things in journalism. In Cambridge recently, for a couple of quid, I picked up an old paperback collection of them, put together, with a few of his own thought-provoking columns, by the paper’s readers’ editor, Ian Mayes. Here are a few crackers:

20 January 2001

The details of Derek Malcolm’s new book, page 5, G2, January 18, were correct except for the title, publisher and price. The book is A Century of Films: Derek Malcolm’s Personal Best (not Derek Malcolm’s Personal Best: A Century of Films). The publisher’s name is IB Tauris (not ID Tauris), but more specifically the imprint is Tauris Parke Paperbacks. The price is £9.99 not £9.95.

11 January 2002

Contrary to what we said in a column headed Return of the living dead, page 19, yesterday, HMS Hampshire did not sink after hitting a land mine. They are rarely found at sea.

24 November 2001

The writer of a column about mispelling, including his own inability to spell, page 5, G2, yesterday, sympathised with Dan Quayle’s ‘infamous’ gaffe in adding an e to tomato. He did not. He added an e to potato (potatoe).

[Misspelling is misspelt in this correction, as a reader quickly pointed out.]