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New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 456, 19 March 1948, Page 30

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WiTH regret I notice that This Correspondence Must Now Cease has now ceased from 2YA, leaving listeners filled with nostalgia for those spacious days when the laws of libel were looser than they are to-day, when there were places other than the floor of the House for the coining and hurling of opprobrious epithets. Last in the series was the controversy between Byron and Lord Elgin on the subject of the Elgin marbles in which Byron may be considered to have won on points (a thymed barb sticks longer, and Lord Elgin never achieved anything so ungentlemanly as Byron’s "filthy jackal" or "fixed statue on the pedestal of scorn’) but in which Lord Elgin ultimately carried off the victor’s £35,000 | purse and achieved honourable mention in the editorial column of The Times. This series of programmes was of great (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) value in driving home to us the lesson that the race is not always to the swift or the controversy to the more controversial, for in this particular dispute the skill in the use of weapons and the zest for the combat are all on Byron’s side. However, Lord Elgin’s very prosiness is convincing, and the dull weight of his earnestness impresses us more than Byron’s brilliant invective. But the very fact that I, an unbiased listener, felt compelled to take sides in a question as remote from me as the wellburied one of the Elgin Marbles is a gratifying proof of the potency of cun-ningly-presented radio controversy.