A tendency to collect kings

Some day this book may be in the footnotes of all social histories of the early 21st century, not for what it contains but for what it is: 500 pages of not the collected, but the selected letters of one human being. For, sidelined by the telephone and the email, the letter-writer is about to follow the fletcher and the high-street fishmonger into the past.

And until they find some way of retrieving the spoken word from space, future historians, with only printed emails to go on, will puzzle over the terseness which at the turn of the century came into human communication. Suddenly we are as tight-lipped and purposeful as Western gun-fighters. Will anyone ever again write letters the way Martha Gellhorn did, 3,000 words, 4,000 words long, and one of 40 pages? More to the point, would anyone, apart from historians and the odd biographer, want to read them?

On the strength of this selection, I doubt if many will.