The enthusiasm for the Obama versus McCain election has drawn adverse attention to the lack of such excitement in British politics. Reluctance to vote, rejection of old party labels and reliance on foreign money have been an anxiety for some time. According to Professor Vernon Bogdanor of Oxford, the academic community’s unofficial guardian of our constitution, the main problem is not a failure of democratic spirit but of the democratic bodies themselves. This week he reviews two books which propose “sortition” as part of the answer, a return to election by lot: Professor Bogdanor sees much merit in the ancient Athenian ways while suggesting that we try them out in local government before we seek a randomly assembled parliament in Westminster.

Dirk Bogarde was an extraordinarily prolific writer of letters, many of them to women whom he preferred not to meet. Frederic Raphael looks back on an epistolary testament which was a substitute for intimacy and which showed little sign of the author “reading anything but scripts or his own notices”. The Bogarde letters are, nonetheless, full of sharp assessments of the failings of his colleagues and friends – a catalogue to which Raphael makes some characteristic additions of his own.

The Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene will forever be famed as the hack who dismissed Shakespeare as an “upstart crow”. There is some doubt, it seems, as to whether the remark was his or his editor’s – and, as Andrew Hadfield describes, whether Greene’s second claim to notoriety, his death from an excess of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings, was quite true either.

The death of the much loved literary agent and Scottish writer Giles Gordon is all too precisely fixed in some of our minds – five years ago this week. One of his legion of grateful clients, the poet and novelist Robert Nye, offers him and us “A Postcard from Crete” in memoriam.

Peter Stothard

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