The late Gardner Botsford was for almost four decades - from 1942 till 1982, with a couple of years off fighting the Nazis - an editor at the New Yorker. Among the many good things in his elegant and enjoyable memoir, A Life of Privilege, Mostly (Granta, £12.99), are 'a few observations on how fiction should be handled' by Wolcott Gibbs, who, before he became the New Yorker's theatre critic, 'had been (I was told) the best editor the magazine had ever seen'. 'Writers always use too damn many adverbs,' the first of Gibbs's observations begins. 'On one page recently, I found five modifying the verb "said" - "he said morosely . . . violently . . . eloquently" and so on. Editorial theory should probably be that a writer who can't make his context indicate the way his character is talking ought to be in another line of work.' Some of the others are terser: 'On the whole, we are hostile to puns'; 'Try to reserve the author's style, if he is an author and has a style.'

LRB 26 January 2006 | PDF Download