Samuel Taylor Coleridge was said to have been the last man who had read everything. That couldn’t have been true two hundred years ago, and it’s even more unlikely now, given the proliferation of books and how much time we all spend consuming internet pap.
In The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800 (1969), the British critic John Gross argued that the heyday of men of letters was long gone.
It was Gross (1935–2011)—himself a worthy candidate for the last Englishman of Letters—who first commissioned a Scotsman of Letters, James Campbell (a.k.a. J. C.), to write for the Times Literary Supplement, Britain’s leading literary periodical, edited by Gross from 1974 to 1981.
A later editor, Ferdinand Mount—my father (I must confess, as a literary “nepo baby,” that I also worked at the TLS for my dad and I know Campbell)—got J. C. to write the NB column in the TLS. Campbell proceeded to file the column once a week from 1997 to 2020.
NB is the TLS’s amusing diary. It has no specific brief, but, in his wide range, Campbell covered all aspects of the literary world.
Most journalism dates, but NB doesn’t. It makes for an intriguing commentary on the gathering pace of political correctness in the world of books.
Thirty years ago, Campbell’s predecessor in the NBslot, David Sexton, noted how “Alison Prince was asked to change