These days even trigger warnings are triggering. A university is discovered to be chaperoning a text with a warning to students that it may “trigger” the memory of past trauma. This triggers the socially conservative, who anxiously conclude that another institution has surrendered to the iron whim of a generation of snowflakes.
Even those of us who try to respect the ebb and flow of cultural mores surely winced when it transpired last week that the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland had alerted its charges to the news that Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea contained “graphic fishing scenes”. Scotland lands more than 300,000 tonnes of fish every year. In the novel, after 84 days without a bite, the old
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