Graham greene

If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me to cut to the chase and just recommend some children’s books, but bear with me. I’m on the case. My campaign is to have pictures in books again. Adult books too, but obviously books for children. There are some wonderful illustrators out there, contemporary ones, for all ages, and the scandalous thing is, they are usually limited to the age range, 0–7. If you want to remind yourself what we’re missing, make for the House of Illustration in London’s King’s Cross; that should do it. Or try Chris Beetles’s annual, brilliant exhibition, The Illustrators, on now at his St James’s gallery.

Mistakes will sometimes happen even in the best-run places. Pictured with this post, by way of proof, is a 1947 Penguin paperback of Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads, with the author's name misspelt on the spine. It's still common to talk of 'typographical errors', or typos, but back in 1947 there really was such a thing: it meant a mistake made by compositors at the printer, rather than by editors or designers. Probably this was one; certainly that is what someone will have tried to tell Allen Lane. These days any mistakes are definitely our fault - in the case of the printed Spectator, indeed, they are usually my fault, as chief sub. Which brings me to the other lesson of this book: how easily mistakes can be overlooked. I owned it for several years without ever seeing anything odd.

One of the unanticipated benefits of British rule in India is the body of distinguished writing in the English language coming from the Indian diaspora — Naipaul, Seth, Rushdie, Mistry, Mishra and Pico Iyer. Iyer, however, is atypical in that he was born in Oxford, lived in California, and was educated at Eton and Oxford. Thus he is less an Indian than a global author. He is coy about having been to Eton, which he does not name: it is the ‘high school near London’, ‘somewhere between the grey towns of Slough and Windsor’, which was founded by a king, has the oldest classroom in the world, and has provided Britain with 19 prime ministers.