They Got it Wrong! [antikvár]

Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong. T. H. Huxley. There is more to achieving Regrettability than being merely wrong. Millions of us get it wrong every time we buy a ticket for the National Lottery, but we don't expect to be known for the rest of our lives as the person who wasted a whole pound, or even a million pounds, on six useless numbers. Wrongness of this sort, even on a grand scale, does not achieve the special quality of Regrettability. Nor is it necessarily even a matter of publicity. You could go out and buy yourself a million Lottery tickets, and be quoted in a mass-circulation newspaper prophesying huge winnings, and end up winning nothing at all, and still not be Regrettable. You'd just be a perfectly ordinary and sadly unremarkable monumental idiot . . . Unless, that is, you happened to be an eminent professor of Mathematics, one of the foremost authorities of your generation on Probability Theory and the author of a well-known work on the futility of betting systems and the gullibility of those who are taken in by them. You'd become Regrettable then, all right: in fact, you would be in a very similar situation to the one Lord Dacre found himself in after he pronounced on the authenticity of the 'Hitler Diaries'. Your name would feature in subsequent editions of this book. This would, of course, be a great honour. Even so, Llm seems rather a high price to pay for it. It's not recommended. And in any case, for each person who goes out of his (or, I need surely not add again, her) way to achieve such immortality there are bound to be dozens more who have it, so to speak, thrust upon them simply as a reward for being their own very special and wonderful selves. These are the people who are quoted in this book: the professionals, people who, in the chosen courses of their lives, have talked or written