Readers should be aware that Paddy’s letters are not necessarily reproduced in full: I have chosen to omit long travelogues and the more mundane passages which often refer to practical arrangements of ephemeral interest. Excisions are indicated by ellipses. I have taken it upon myself to correct Paddy’s spelling errors, particularly in the use of foreign words and names, though I decided to retain his delightful spelling of ‘picknick’. I have also standardised his somewhat erratic punctuation. As he himself would frequently lament, his handwriting is notoriously difficult to decipher, so I have sometimes been obliged to resort to guesswork, and no doubt my guesses have been wrong on occasion. A few words have remained stubbornly illegible. I have used square brackets for simple translations or other brief expository material, to avoid unnecessary annotation. Words that Paddy underlined are usually presented in italics, to conform to standard publishers’ practice. My own footnotes are listed numerically at the end of each letter; I have retained a few of Paddy’s footnotes, which are indicated with an asterisk and printed at the foot of the page.
Most of the quotations in my introductory passages are taken from Ben Downing’s interview, which appeared after Paddy’s death in the Paris Review; or from the volume of correspondence between Paddy and Debo Devonshire, published under the title In Tearing Haste. Short profiles of the people mentioned most often in the letters, including most of the addressees, are provided in a dramatis personae at the end of the book.