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. I loved Martha Gellhorn’s collection of travel writings, Travels with Myself and Another. They were intelligent, beautifully written, funny; I have read them over and over. But they were about other people. Reading letters not addressed to you is like overhearing a monologue in a trapped lift: the one voice goes on and on. To enjoy them you really have to get to like the personality endlessly on display. And that is the trouble with this book.

The Martha of the letters is not an entirely likeable human being. As you read on and on, page after page, you begin to realise that the recipients mostly had one thing in common: they were already famous, and thus might be of some use. The lame, the halt and the weak, you will not find them here. Instead there are letters to Eleanor Roosevelt (in whose White House she stays), to Adlai Stevenson, H.G.