From Spike Milligan — and Marge Simpson — with love, light, peace and great respect

This book is a serious bit of kit. Its hard covers measure 28.9 by 21 centimetres, and it weighs 1.62 kilograms — 324,000 times the amount of valium, we learn on page 98, that Tom Clancy needed to appear on Good Morning America (‘Sorry to wimp out, but, shit, I was scared’). The illustrations are beautiful. Very often they are simply the letters themselves (don’t worry about handwriting, there are transcripts too), but sometimes they reference the content. For instance a photograph of butterflies accompanies the biologist Rachel Carson’s letter about watching said creatures with a friend.. The butterflies were on their final migration, and Carson was dying of cancer: ‘a happy spectacle… when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural.’

Shaun Usher started his ‘Letters of Note’ blog in 2009. The door on which he knocked wasn’t so much open as hanging off its hinges.