The virtues of an unrepresentative sample
An epistolary history of Britain’s changing society
THE LETTERS came every day. Sometimes a dozen, often more. The librarians of the University of Sussex were accustomed to a steady trickle of outside interest: they were the keepers of Virginia Woolf’s papers and Rudyard Kipling’s. But suddenly, in the early summer of 1981, the post bags bulged. They all ended up in one room of the library, where mounds of correspondence already teetered on every surface. And still more turned up. At Christmas, cards arrived, scores of them.
This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline “Pocock’s pen pals”
Christmas Specials December 18th 2021
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- An economic history of restaurants
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- The mathematical method that could offer a fairer way to vote
- How to prevent conflict on the way to Mars
- Scenes from an almost vanished Singapore
- Retracing Julius Caesar’s path through France
From the December 18th 2021 edition
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