Oxford Circus: ‘John Le Carré: Tradecraft’, Weston Library, Oxford

John Le Carré insisted that he was a writer first, and sometime spy second – and this excellent exhibition drawn from the author’s archive honours that self-image. It’s easy to emerge from the exit thinking Le Carré was half man, half words but – appropriately enough – the reality is not so simple. The entrance…

Our dictionaries are being sucked into a maw called the internet

We modern-day Luddites (I am 87) hate stooping to the web for dubious factoids, preferring to get our answers from well-edited books including our old dictionaries that were printed with ink on fine-fibre paper. Those books are now disappearing into a hungry maw called the internet.