BEN HUR – how big? On 3 September we expressed our puzzlement over a landslip blocking a road in the Manawatu gorge in New Zealand. It was going to take a week to clear and was described in the New Zealand Herald as “bigger than Ben-Hur”.
Several readers from that part of the world wrote to inform us that, in Tom Sutton’s words, “the saying is part of our local language, a colloquialism, started when the ‘big production’ of the film occurred.” As Andrew Ross amplifies, “it was bigger than any movie since way back when, as I…
