‘As anyone who has gleefully spotted a typo in a prestigious publication, felt a flicker of schadenfreude at a pompous critic’s downfall, or secretly enjoyed a literary scandal knows, it is possible to love books while delighting in their disasters.’ The sentiment expressed in Rogues, Widows and Orphans is familiar to this reviewer. Rebecca Lee, who has been an editor for two decades, knows very well how words ‘get good’ (to quote the title of her earlier book) and what happens when they go wrong. Her new work ‘offers a lick of every flavour of ick lit’, leaving the reader craving more.

Errors and omissions in print have consequences for everyone involved. The publishers of Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm (1948), we learn, were able to correct a typo the author spotted at the last minute. ‘The poop of the French nation’ didn’t make it into the book, which correctly describes the French army as the ‘prop’ of said nation. Lee doesn’t tell us what, except for the author’s ire, befell those responsible. Nor does she mention that around the same time typos formed a separate genre in totalitarian societies. Any mistakes that concerned Churchill’s Soviet counterpart, Joseph Stalin, were deadly. When the 25 October 1944 issue of Pravda Vostoka misspelled the leader’s military rank, ‘commander-in-chief’ (whereby it, too, was........

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