I used to work for a man like him. A sweet man, great to work for in so many ways. But even the office copy of the Financial Times came round bearing the marks of his blue pencil upon it. He once came into my room bang up against the deadline with the final draft copy of a report which had been extremely difficult: This is terrible. It cannot go out in this condition.
I could barely catch my breath as I envisioned some fundamental error with the figures, deadline missed, egg on face all round.
It was just some misplaced commas.
But last Saturday, in an uncharacteristically self-deprecating piece, Kamm explained something which matters to almost no one but him (he?) & one other writer in English.
The formal name of the Baader-Meinhoff gang, Rote Armee Fraktion, should be translated as Red Army Fraction rather than, as is the otherwise universally accepted version, the Red Army Faction.
A faction is a break away group of dissidents, splintered off from the parent.
A fraction is a part of the whole, having more in common with what these days we might call a cell – or in the days of C19th Fenians & the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a circle. A disciplined unit which uses violence to further the aims of the revolutionary organisation.
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