Compare and contrast Wikipedia’s biographies of famous people with those done by professionals.
Today’s biography: Campaigning journalist Paul Foot, as written up in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Foot, Paul Mackintosh (1937–2004), journalist, was born on 8 November 1937 in Haifa, Palestine, the son of Hugh Mackintosh Foot (1907–1990), later Baron Caradon, governor of Jamaica and Cyprus, and at the time an administrative officer in the Palestinian government, and his wife, (Florence) Sylvia (d. 1985), daughter of Arthur White Millar Tod, director of the Steam Navigation Company of Baghdad. The Foots were a famous west-country family deeply rooted in radical Liberal tradition; Paul’s grandfather Isaac Foot was a Liberal MP and Methodist. Three of Foot’s uncles were politicians. Michael Foot became leader of the Labour Party, Dingle Foot was solicitor-general under Harold Wilson, and John Foot was a Liberal life peer (as Baron Foot). Paul was educated at Shrewsbury School, which was to provide the founding spirits of the satirical magazine Private Eye, Christopher Booker, Willie Rushton, and Foot’s lifelong friend Richard Ingrams. ‘At Shrewsbury I was on Ingrams’ coat tails’, recalled Foot, who freely admitted to hero worship (Thompson, 43–4). National service followed and when, in 1958, at the end of his stint as a subaltern, he went to University College, Oxford, to read jurisprudence the first person he came across was Ingrams.
In the late 1950s Oxford University’s premier magazine, Isis, had been taken over by the ‘new left’ under the editorship of Dennis Potter, later to become one of Britain’s most accomplished television playwrights. Foot, who had not yet made the journey from his family’s traditional Liberal beliefs to the far left, invited him to speak to the University Liberal Club, of which he was president. Potter’s speech was remarkable for the observation that when he saw a Rolls-Royce he spat at it (Ingrams, My Friend Footy, 22). Foot’s radical juices began to race and, together with Ingrams, they took over Parson’s Pleasure magazine. It did not last long and was reborn, with the help of Rushton, Booker, and John Wells, as Mesopotamia. This was the embryonic Private Eye. Foot went on to be a short-lived editor of Isis but the magazine was banned by the university proctors after he introduced critical reviews of lectures. He attacked the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and resigned when Isis’s owners decided to apologize. In his last term he became president of the Oxford Union, where he honed his considerable oratorical powers, as well as fulfilling half his father’s bidding, contained in a telegram that greeted his arrival in Oxford: ‘Get a first and be president of the Union’ (ibid., 12). A life of protest and campaigning against injustice and intolerance had begun.
Now compare with Wikipedia’s biography of Paul Foot :
Paul Mackintosh Foot (8 November 1937 in Palestine – 18 July 2004 at Stansted Airport) was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He was the son of Hugh Foot (who was the last Governor of Cyprus and, as Lord Caradon, was the UK Ambassador at the United Nations from 1964 to 1970). He was the nephew of Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour Party, and was educated at Shrewsbury School and at University College, Oxford.
Education
Contemporaries at Shrewsbury included Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and several other friends who would later become involved in Private Eye.
Anthony Chenevix-Trench was his Housemaster at Shrewsbury between 1950 and 1955, a time when corporal punishment in all schools was commonplace. In adult life, Foot exposed the ritual beatings that Chevenix-Trench had given. As Nick Cohen wrote in Foot’s obituary in The Observer:
“ Even by the standards of England’s public schools, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, his housemaster at Shrewsbury, was a flagellomaniac. Foot recalled: ‘He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn’t. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant’s trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt.[1] ” Exposing him in Private Eye was one of Foot’s happiest days in journalism. He received hundreds of congratulatory letters from the child abuser’s old pupils, many of whom were then prominent in British life.
After his national service in Jamaica, Foot was reunited with Ingrams at Oxford and wrote for Isis, one of the student publications at the University.
Read both biographies and then tell me which is the better, fuller account with more information about the person, a better writing style and which one is filled with trivia.
Time to read: 15 minutes.
GO!
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