This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books Podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week I'm proud to be joined by Adam Sissman, a very distinguished biographer most recently of John LeCarray,

but who in this case is more of an anthologist and editor. He's about to publish the second

volume of the, well, not collected, but the selected letters of Patrick Paddy Lee Fermo called

Moore Dashing. The first one was called, I think, dashing for the Post, wasn't it, which is how he often signed off his letters. He always seemed to be writing in a rush.

And indeed, in some of the letters, he actually describes the postman drumming his fingers,

as Paddy desperately adds a last post script.

That's sort of writing to the moment, isn't it?

Now, this kind of overlap, it's not a sort of second volume in sequence, is it?

No.

So was it something you didn't anticipate when you put together the first one?

And then, as it were, you realise there was this appetite for them.

No, on the contrary, I did anticipate.

And for example, I realised that there was a magnificent sequence of letters

between Paddy and Lady Diana Cooper. One could, in fact, have made a volume

solely out of those, just as there was a volume of letters between Paddy and Debo, Devonshire, in Taring Haste,

published in 2008, I think. So there were enough letters in that correspondence to make another volume of a similar size.

And I didn't want

the first volume to be distorted by having too many letters of any one type. So I was already

thinking then, putting letters aside and thinking, we'll have that in the second volume. And indeed,

...