Subject: LRB PITCH: God’s Only Mistake
From: Benjamin Disraeli (b.disraeli.writer@gmail.com)
To: mkwilmers@lrb.co.uk
Dear Mary-Kay,
You will, I am sure, have seen that in the current political climate we are at risk of becoming two nations. Your periodical will no doubt be determined to offer a platform for authentic voices of protest whilst maintaining an element of style in literary terms.
In the spirit of this I offer you my services as a young and upcoming writer – my bylines include satirical articles in The Morning Post, the ‘Runnymede’ column in the tls and a series of carefully constructed Reddit posts on the ‘Age Gap Relationship’ forum.
I am one acquainted with the deepest yearnings of the working man, who sees such insults to his liberty celebrated in public. Yet I am also able to maintain the dignity of sentence structure which your readers expect at an annual subscription of £105.
My subject is to be Mr Gladstone – provisional title ‘God’s Only Mistake’. He is a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity who at all times seeks only to glorify himself. How appropriate then that his cult of personality is to suffer a damnatio memoriae. And in his own native city too!
If it was agreeable, I could dig out some allusions to similar pathetic ends in Shakespeare or Sir Walter Scott and adapt them to the situation in hand. All magazine readers like to have their intellects flattered. And when it comes to the lrb: I think it best to lay it on with a trowel.
I can have a submission with you by sundown but, knowing as I do that you are an organ capable of commanding considerable financial reserves, I must insist on payment of invoices within a week.
I note that Alan Bennett’s so called ‘diaries’ continue to find a place among your pages, despite the rejection note sent to the anonymous genius behind Vivian Grey which claimed, and I quote, ‘we do not publish fiction’.
