When writers are grand enough, they can produce books by recycling their journalism, lectures, academic papers and other jottings. Sometimes that can seem dated and lazy. Sometimes it is a treat: the assorted pieces come together to create a great mosaic. Neither "Facts are Subversive" by Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford-based writer and academic, nor "Gray's Anatomy" by John Gray, a political philosopher, fall into the first trap (or at least very rarely). They are both good reads.
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