14 November 2008

The Oxford media

Copy of a letter sent several weeks ago by my colleague Dr Charles McCreery to a presenter on Radio Oxford, to which he has had no reply.

I understand that you have invited Celia Green and Christine Fulcher to put their names forward for inclusion on the guest list for a launch party for a book you have written.

We invited you to a launching party which we had in Cuddesdon about two years ago for Celia Green’s latest book, Letters From Exile: Observations on a Culture in Decline. To the best of my recollection, we did not receive an acknowledgement of this invitation.

Altogether dozens of invitations were sent out for this function, to which in the end only one guest turned up. A high proportion of all the invitations were to people in the Oxford area, as opposed to London , so that any difficulty in travelling here could not have been an explanation.

Over the last forty years Celia has published nine books, none of which has been reviewed by the Oxford Times.

The last time Celia was invited to be interviewed on Radio Oxford was in connection with a lecture she gave which happened to have the phrase ‘Da Vinci Code’ in the title, so that the station apparently thought it could be assimilated to the then popular interest in a non-scholarly book.