At the Guardian Review

Edward Hammond on four books about graffiti (he writes from ten years' experience doing graffiti, but he loses credibility with me by using the awful word "youngsters" in the opening paragraph--or perhaps this is a US/UK usage thing?!?); Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Paine; and John Mullan on the New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes ('Such stories are richly available only from the early 18th century, when memoirs began to be published and conversations recorded. An anecdote tells how Horace Walpole would "suddenly purse up his mouth in a pointed but ludicrous manner whenever Boswell came into the room, and sit mute as a fish till that angler for anecdote and repartee had left it"').