• An interview with the photographer and activist Nan Goldin said that “four out of five Americans who had been prescribed prescription painkillers were now using street heroin”. That misrepresented a statistic published in 2016 by the American Society of Addiction Medicine that four in five new heroin users started out misusing prescription painkillers (‘I wanted to tell my truth’, 4 December, New Review, p8).
• An editorial stated that “seven in 10 members of the judiciary were privately educated”. However, that should have referred to the senior judiciary; the proportion is in fact two-thirds (Our schools need radical change to overcome elitism, 4 December, p50).
• A feature about Sight and Sound magazine’s latest list of the 100 greatest films of all time neglected to mention the title of the new “winner”: the Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Also, the plane flown in the opening scene of A Matter of Life and Death is a Lancaster bomber, not a “fighter” as stated (What’s best about British cinema? Invention, not grit, 4 December, p48).
• The Fleetwood Mac song Little Lies was on 1987’s Tango in the Night album, not Rumours as a column said (Christine McVie, you gave us music for all time. Farewell, 4 December, p54).
• Other recently amended articles include:
Between Friends: Letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby review – a strange sisterhood
• Write to the Readers’ Editor, the Observer, York Way, London N1 9GU, email observer.readers@observer.co.uk, tel 020 3353 4736
