I think I would like to know about it all the same

Julian Barnes

• The ‘Private Eye’ Story: The First 21 Years by Patrick Marnham
  Deutsch/Private Eye, 232 pp, £7.95, October 1982, ISBN 0 233 97509 8
• One for the Road: Further Letters of Denis Thatcher by Richard Ingrams and John Wells
  Deutsch/Private Eye, 80 pp, £2.50, October 1982, ISBN 0 233 97511 X
• Sir James Goldsmith: The Man and the Myth by Geoffrey Wansell
  Fontana, 222 pp, £1.95, April 1982, ISBN 0 00 636503 5

In Abel Gance’s film Napoleon there is a brilliant sequence in the Revolutionary Bureau of Indictments. The walls are stacked to the ceiling with the files of known, suspected, possible and deeply fanciful enemies of the Revolution; some are bulky, well-researched dossiers, others the constructions of dishonest, mean-spirited score-settlers. This key office of the new masters exudes smugness, oafishness and fear (might it be their turn next?). Every so often, a clerk is winched up towards the ceiling on a precarious pulley system, a file is taken down, and another execution is assured. Once your dossier has reached the Bureau there is no way of avoiding the tumbril – except one: in the corner of the office sit a pair of humble, twitchy, freedom-loving scriveners, who are quietly eating their way through one of the indictments.