Andrew O’Hagan

“For a few days after the explosions, the atmosphere was bad on the buses. Passengers were looking into every face as they sat on a Number 30 from King’s Cross, and if the face happened to be brown, they looked to their bag or backpack. That is how fear and paranoia work: they create turbulence in your everyday passivity, and everyone was affected after the attempted bombings on 22 July in ways that won’t quickly go away. In the realm of paranoia, the second bombings were more powerful than the first, for they made it clear how very gettable we are, even in a culture of high alert. To anyone with imagination (or who knows anyone who’s ever had a second stroke) the most recent attack brings a dimension of constant threat. No one needed to die for this to take effect: 7 July showed us what death on the bus or the Tube looks like; the second attack showed that these images wouldn’t be allowed to remain just a bad memory.”

Perhaps we have to thank Watergate, even Deep Throat himself, that sussurating, parking-lot ghoul, for planting us in a world where the shriek of actuality has given way to the soft lilt of fiction. To me there is a stylistic link between that great moment for the Washington Post and the paper’s worst moment, in September 1980, when they ran a report by Janet Cooke that had everyone...

When I was young people didn’t die and they didn’t pass away. They certainly didn’t expire, or perish, though there was a woman in our street called Hazel who dabbled in spiritualism while her philandering husband went out to fix people’s Hotpoint twin-tubs, and she quite often spoke of people who had ‘crossed to the other side’. I thought that was sick....

“No writer of the Victorian period has ever had more said about his appearance. Not even Oscar Wilde, who invited such remarks. We know nothing of Meredith’s complexion or the swell of Trollope’s chest; we are left innocent about the ankle-shape of Gissing, the eyes of Mrs Gaskell. Yet we are now duty bound to inspect the Stevenson corpus. We are led to see ourselves touching his clammy magician’s hands, and almost to imagine wiping the hair from his fevered brow. People have always had a very particular, not to say caricatured, image of the physical RLS, but none of them so alert as the one he presented himself. He was a sensitive Shelleyan plant, and he studiously lost himself amid the fierce greenery of his own self-image.”

People have been asking for books to help them since the invention of printing. Before printing, actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but...