Paper Monitor
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Paper Monitor has just been brushing up on its legal knowledge this morning, so has its interest piqued by a little piece in the Independent.
The Daily Telegraph has just had to pay out monies after a libel claim by an author whose work was reviewed by Lynn Barber.
We won't go into the details of the case, which are a little complicated, but suffice it to say it's got the Indy excited. The paper rounds up some of the bits of biting criticism of the type it now thinks will bite the dust.
Paper Monitor has a few favourites of its own.
"Paint Never Dries," was the moniker given to Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Phantom sequel Love Never Dies. The West End Whingers blog was given the credit for this awesomeness.
Walter Kerr's response to the film I Am a Camera has also gone down in history. "Me no Leica" is the kind of thing that if Paper Monitor had thought of it, it would retire immediately afterwards.
On a marginally lower level of greatness is Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian. In , Bradshaw flirted with greatness while comparing it with Swept Away.
"As we watched Madonna sing "Come on over to my house" in that film, we thought: OK. This is on a level with 18th-century dentistry, but at least this is the lowest it can go... Oh how wrong. How very wrong. Because after Revolver, Swept Away now looks like Citizen Kane."
The central point is that negative reviews can be beautiful things. But obviously, you should never libel anybody.