Can we get this straight once and for all, please? Today was the day in 1780 when John Andre was executed by the American colonists as a spy and working with the traitor Benedict Arnold. Andre knew the risks he was taking and was unlucky; that's Africa. But Benedict Arnold was not a traitor. Today, thinking Americans equate him with Adolf Hitler, Vlad Dracula and Attila the Hun, but he was actually doing his duty as a British subject, which all American colonists were. it was all the rest who were the traitors, whatever gloss the slave-owning, line-pinching Thomas Jefferson tried to put on it in the Declaration of Independence.
In other news ...
'There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - they need the money.'
(With sincere apologies to John Fowles, who said something totally different today in 1977).
