Peter Rhodes on the T-word, a butchered book and how to look like a copper for £60

The row over the BBC and the T-word rumbles on. The Beeb insists that: “Anyone watching or listening to our coverage will hear the word 'terrorist' used many times - we attribute it to those who are using it, for example, the UK Government.” The implication is that the Beeb never directly uses the term.

Yet on the BBC website you will see the 9/11 Twin Towers attack plainly described as “a terrorist attack,” while the July 2005 bomb attacks in London were “one of the worst terrorist atrocities in Britain.”

More perplexing is the BBC's treatment of two political murders. Thomas Mair who killed the Palestine-supporting Labour MP Jo Cox was, according to the Beeb, a “far-right terrorist” (For good measure, one BBC report said Mair's crime was “the very definition of an act of terrorism.”). Yet Ali Harbi Ali who murdered Sir David Amess, the Tory MP and member of Conservative Friends of Israel, was, in a BBC report, merely an “IS fanatic.” Intriguing.

A survey among book lovers reveals that the most memorable opening line for any novel comes in Charles Dickens's classic, A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Depends which version you read.

My copy is a 1944 edition and there's nothing to tell the reader that it's not the real thing. It was produced by Herbert Strang's Library, a division of Oxford University Press. Apparently these books were “carefully edited for school and home reading.” In this case, the “careful” editing involved chucking out Dickens's inspirational Chapter One entirely, along with that glorious opening, and starting the story at Chapter Two, cunningly renamed Chapter One. A Tale of One Travesty.