Great Uncle Fred? I am enjoying this book that I’m reading but its title is very annoying. It is a fun book and it’s interesting and it’s useful but it is not ‘Dangerous’. It tells you how to do dangerous things if you think that making a tree house is dangerous or fishing or catching a rabbit, and most of the stuff isn’t like that. Most of the stuff is just information, flags, history. I think its title must be the most annoying title of a book that lots of people have bought. What do you think? (Jack, Autumn 2007)

Yes...hmm...well...I suppose you could say that writing is difficult because it is difficult to tell the truth and telling the truth, somehow or other, is the purpose of writing... ...actually, it is not difficult to tell the truth, it is impossible - because the truth is beyond the capacity of a human being to grasp, I think, truthfully. The best one can do, while maintaining a certain level of elegance, is to try to be accurate but this, accuracy, is not easy to achieve either. Writers must try, however, to be accurate. It is what they’re about - and it seems fair to judge a writer by his or her level of accuracy. When it comes to books, this obligation to be precise should start with the title. The title, unless it’s a joke, should not mislead, it should contain no factual error, it should give a fair impression of what lies between the covers. You think I’ve lost my thread, got carried away? Actually, I have an end in view. You see, I think your book has an annoying title but I do not think that it is the most annoying title ever. No. Well, I have another candidate for the most annoying title title. Please may I provide you with some statistics? Disregarding Australia, which is, as you know, a continental land-mass, Greenland (822,700 square miles) is the largest island in the world. New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar and Baffin Island come next. The eighth largest island in the world, at 84,400 square miles, is Great Britain. Please remember that: Britain (that is, mainland Scotland, Wales and England) is the eighth largest island in the world. The whole world. The criteria for an island - a fairly permanent piece of land surrounded by water and possessing substantial vegetation - can be met by an islet of less than 100 square feet. Given this fact, and given that islands are more likely to appear, just like that, than any other physical feature, it would be impossible to say how many islands there are in the world. However, to give a rough idea, Finland reckons that she has 179,584 islands, Sweden 221,800. Majorca, 1,405 square miles in area, is the 147th biggest island in the world. Skye, way down the list, 639 square miles. Should either be described as a ‘small island’? You try walking from one end of Skye to the other. There are 9,000 inhabited islands; 700 million people live on them. The most common name for an island is ‘Big Island’. This, however, was not a name considered appropriate to Great Britain by an American gentleman when he was considering the title for his book, published in 1995, a book that became one of the most successful of its time - `Notes from a Small Island`. He was making a comparison in that title between the size of his native U.S. and the U.K. He really meant ‘a small country’. But it is not that either. And it is certainly not a small island. It is the eighth largest island in the world. Eighth out of ... out of ... a lot. Surely that title deserves to be considered the most annoying title of a best-selling book, ever?

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