John Crace (Practice doesn’t make perfect for Boris Johnson apology, 22 April) provides amusing evidence from 1936 that “the towering conscience of a generation [George Orwell] might possibly have written reviews of books he had not read”.
Orwell’s essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer, published in Tribune in 1946, can be found online in the Orwell Foundation and my favourite sentence, relating to the latest parcel of books he had to review, is: “Three of these books deal with subjects of which he is so ignorant that he will have to read at least 50 pages if he is to avoid making some howler which will betray him not merely to the author (who of course knows all about the habits of book reviewers), but even to the general reader.”
At least the towering conscience came clean a decade later.
Peter Davis
Welwyn, Hertfordshire
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