It is the prickliness that makes for interest in this collection of more than 700 letters written over some 70 years. Oddly, the collection is not as exciting or stimulating as one would expect from this most incandescent and opinionated of writers. Although there are some wonderful set-pieces – a long fantasy of meeting Scott Fitzgerald in Europe, for instance, and a scorching protest to the New Yorker over Anthony West's adverse review of Augie March – it would seem that, unlike his greatest creation, the maniacally epistolary Moses Herzog, Bellow in his letters tended to relax the force of his personality.