11/25/2023 0 Comments David taylor pastor lawyers![]() ![]() Taylor of Joshua Media Ministries International claims he engaged in multiple extramarital affairs during their relationship and got her pregnant before they were married. Tabitha Taylor, the ex-wife of controversial Missouri Pastor David E. Taylor of Joshua Media Ministries International in Florissant, Mo., and his ex-wife Tabitha Taylor (inset). Take those with the direst ratings in this week's Guardian/ICM poll.Controversial Pastor David E. Yet perhaps there are moments when ministers facing mockery might be tempted to reinvent the form. For one thing, it would make interviews so awkward and cumbersome: imagine addressing the present prime minister as "ACL" rather than Tony, or Iain Duncan Smith as ID. I doubt if politicians will return to the practice. Most of us, in today's gregarious gossipy world, know that Byatt is Antonia and James is Phyllis, but with some of the others we can't be so sure. Today we have, among others, AS Byatt and PD James, UA Fanthorpe, AL Kennedy and JK Rowling. Edith Nesbit published as plain E Nesbit. Others, rejecting a sobriquet, still opted for reticence. The Brontës went the whole hog, disguising themselves as Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell, all designed to sound masculine. ![]() For women, it can also be a way of downplaying gender. It is hardly some urge for a decorous retreat from the limelight that persuades such a chronic exhibitionist as the columnist Adrian Gill to lurk behind the initials AA. Sometimes it's done to differentiate oneself from the crowd: the Tory politician and lawyer FE Smith had a far better chance of being remembered as an FE than he would have done as a mere Frederick. But maybe BA Young couldn't abide being addressed as Bertram. The most famous example of that today is fictional: E Morse, in the Colin Dexter novels, unwilling to confess that his parents had called him Endeavour. What made initials such an attraction? In some cases, perhaps, a simple revulsion against one's given first name, all the more painful when you weren't equipped with a second. The name on the back of The Future of Socialism, published in 1956, was CAR Crosland, but soon he was known as Anthony, and very soon after as Tony. By the 1960s there were possibly only two senior figures still better known by initials than first names: RA Butler and RHS Crossman. There, the tendency has been rather to dump your first given name in favour of your second: A Neville Chamberlain, R Anthony Eden, M Harold Macmillan, J Harold Wilson, L James Callaghan, J Gordon Brown. The tendency still persists, though I think on a more modest scale among writers these days - VS Naipaul, AN Wilson. CA Lejeune (rarely Caroline) was film critic of the Observer. Fortunes in the theatre were made or broken by WA Darlington of the Telegraph and TC Worsley and BA Young of the Financial Times. The preference for initials persisted through the middle years of the century, when people rushed out to buy the latest JB Priestley, LP Hartley or CP Snow or perhaps at a rather more rarefied level, TS Eliot or WH Auden - having first of course checked them out in FR, or possibly QD, Leavis to make sure they deserved one's scrutiny. What an enviable profusion of talented people! And what a lot of initials. This was the heyday too of EM Forster and JM Keynes of the Lawrences, DH and TE. But much of the intellectual and political ferment of the times - as Peter Clarke establishes in his Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990, the concluding volume of the new Penguin History of Britain - was generated by independent writers such as GB Shaw and HG Wells. Scott also employed influential Labour writers: JL Hammond, GDH Cole, RH Tawney.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |