[John Whitworth]

Dunno, mate. I'm quoting the Daily Torygraph. How far back do you have to get to have a hundred ancestors. Wait a minute. Go back to 60 That is 2+4+8+16+32. Great-great-great grandparents and their descendants. Three were white. Six were chinese. And the remaining fifty-odd were black. I think if you mess about with a tree diagram it'll come right.

[Richard Epstein]

So we think that the Telegraph tracked down the great-great-great grandparents of this recent immigrant rapist and their descendents, reckoned the ethnicity of each, and determined that 6 out of the 100 were white? Maybe the guy had a family tree in his pocket.

RHE

[Julie Steiner]

Completely irrelevant to the Eliot topic, and only tangentially relevant to the other tangents here, but some might find this interesting:

"At conception, half the mother's DNA and half the father's go into each of the child's 23 chromosome pairs. But there's no telling how much of it will make the more or less random cut when their grandchildren are conceived, or in any of the subdivisions after that. In theory, you may possess no genetic connection whatsoever to your own great-great-great-grandfather."
--Richard Conniff, "The Family Tree, Pruned: Its lure is powerful--but genealogy is meaningless, relatively" (Smithsonian, July 2007, pp. 90-97)

[John Whitworth]

Dunno. The Telegraph are great ones for tracking as many an MP has found to his cost. I suspect they are quoting some other source. The bottom line is it's a black guy, everybody knew it was a black guy, and though of course it COULD have been a white guy, it wasn't on this occasion. My children are 25% English 25% Scots 25% Irish 25% Welsh, if you go back two generations, but REALLY they are 100% English. Is that relevant? Probably not and you are probably right. Those percentages are crap. The guy's a black West Indian.

[Julie Steiner]

John--is there a more recent article than this one from April 2004? Seems to me that the reason they were reporting the ethnic breakdown results of the DNA testing was not that they wanted to be culturally sensitive. It was that they were still looking for the perpetrator, and that was all the info they had:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...st-Indies.html

Ah, here we are:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...x-attacks.html

Wow. Took 17 years to catch him. Assuming that this is the right guy, of course.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Don't we all go back to Grandma Lucy?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2909803.stm

[Philip Quinlan]

Nope

My grammy looked meaner than that!
.

[Jerome Betts]

I've always thought Eliot's painting of ordinary people in The Waste Land was slightly snobbish - as if seen in great detail but from a great height.

Philip, I wonder if what seems 'slightly snobbish' today would have been thought so at the time of writing, when class and language differences were so much more marked? As a relatively recently arrived American in London Eliot would have observed these in particularly vivid detail, from a 'height' not merely middle-class but alien.

The height, in the case of the pub conversations which form the concluding section of 'A Game of Chess' was literal rather than figurative. Peter Ackroyd's biography of 1984 (p.95) records that when the Eliots were living in Crawford Mansions just south of Baker Street in 1916-20 "the windows . . . looked down upon a pub on the other side of the street which, at closing time, would have been raucous." Eliot confirmed in 1942 that this was the origin of HURRY UP PLEASE IT's TIME in The Waste Land.

[Roy Hamilton]

Much has been said about Eliot; pro and con. I am not really knowledgeable enough to have a strong opinion but I would just like to say that no writer inspires me to write more than T.S. Eliot.

I don't know why, but after reading Prufrock or really any of his work, I can't wait to get at it, and I get many good ideas as well. I have no idea why...he just connects with me I guess.

[Philip Quinlan]

Never mind (I've always wanted to say that - ever since it became popular).