Is there anything more depressing than the prospect of reading a writer’s collected essays, journalism and occasional pieces? Most of it is sheer dross, the work of the left hand, written under the cosh in double-quick time and for easy money. There are of course exceptions: Orwell, though even then you have to wade through a terrible lot of dreck; the late, great, much-missed Gilbert Adair; the New Yorker’s ever-so-sweet E.B.