The artist Cowabunga

If you’re not sure if you’re reading a broadsheet or a tabloid, check the corrections column. If you see a correction like this, you’re reading a broadsheet:

We confused the endings of two Bresson films in the article above when we said that the donkey hero of Au Hasard Balthazar died to the accompaniment of Monteverdi. The soundtrack to Mouchette’s suicide in the film of that name is Monteverdi, while Balthazar dies to the accompaniment of a Schubert piano sonata. This error has been corrected.

This is mother lode for a broadsheet readers’ editor: French directors, baroque composers, fine distinctions.  It can’t always be that way: too often, this level of expertise is lost in the quotidian struggle to correct homophones and pacify libelled entrepreneurs. But when there’s the slightest glimpse of home ground – a classical reference twinkling in the morass – that unique combination of erudition and patience comes to the fore:

In a feature about the return of the TV series Robot Wars, we said the first season “featured … robots with names such as Killertron and Recylopse”. The correct spelling of the latter is Recyclopse, being a play on the facts that the robot was made almost entirely of recycled material and featured one large eye, like the Greek mythical giant Cyclops

And you need patience, because some people’s grasp of 15th century art just makes you roll your eyes:

A film review on Friday about “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” referred incorrectly to the turtles’ names. Three turtles are named for Renaissance artists whose major works included paintings, not four. (Donatello was a sculptor.)