Helene Hanff doesn’t write: she has conversations with her readers. This omnibus is the best comfort food I know, combining nearly everything I love about literature with the least erudite way of explaining it. Ms Hanff is the least pretentious narrator of memoirs going. She tells a brilliant story, usually against herself, and uses exposition in the most natural, artless way possible. She is a literary genius masquerading as a feckless, naive raconteur.