Craig Raine

Seamus Heaney: no shuffling or cutting — just turning over aces

The impersonator — Rory Bremner, Steve Coogan — speaks, in different voices, to a single primitive pleasure centre in his audience. Counterintuitively, we like the imposition of imposture. We connive at deceit, at replication, for the release of neurotransmitters, the flood of endorphins — the brandies of the brain. I once heard Peter Ustinov on

Was he anti-Semitic?

Letters give us the life as lived — day-to-day, shapeless, haphazard, contingent, imperfect, authentic. Letters give us the life as lived — day-to-day, shapeless, haphazard, contingent, imperfect, authentic. That is their value. Life-writing, biography, is plotted, shaped by an argument and is summary, selective and often tendentious. There is a lovely moment in these letters