Indeed, it is quite possible to catch something fatal from a letter From this letter, for instance. You might be interested to know that I have recently written letters very similar to this one to the Earl of Zutland, to the pop singer Sultana, to the politician Sir Lemuel Boot, and to the famous footballer Donaldini…”Something in Zedqvist’s memory stirred .. The Earl of Zutland … That was right! The Earl had recently died at the wheel of his 4×4, while taking his children to school, though his heir had survived And Sultana, of course, had died of cause or causes unknown. And Boot had died last month, and Donaldini, although apparently match fit …Zedqvist let the letter drop from his hand in horror.

All these people had been killed by a letter! And this one was a killer letter too! He looked at it. Might it have already infected him? Might, even now, some supervirus be racing through his veins?A reader writes: Dear Mr Kington, I am writing this letter to ask if there is any truth in this or whether it is a load of old baloney.Miles Kington says: Aaagh! You horrible reader! Get that letter away from me! Don’t touch me! Get your vile stinking germs away from me! Oh, my God, fetch a doctor ..
More from Miles Kington. In his excellent new novel The Plot Against America, Philip Roth re-runs a reel or two of American history with one crucial cast-change. Instead of Roosevelt winning the 1940 election for a third term in office, Charles A Lindbergh, the aviator, takes the presidency for the Republicans. This is, it should be said, highly improbable given the historical record; but in Roth’s hands it is also very plausible.

On a foundation of falsehood he builds a marvellously detailed superstructure in which America’s Jews find themselves steadily pushed towards exclusion, and possibly worse. Reading it last week left me slightly over-sensitive to the notion that absolutely everything that happens is accidental. This is a naive understanding of history and of which Roth himself doesn’t happen to be guilty (the ending of The Plot Against America may well surprise its gloomier readers).
Then it struck me that there is at least one field of human endeavour in which contingency is crucial – and largely invisible. Oddly enough, it happens to be a creative field, an area in which we like to think that human intention has a pretty free sway. I’m talking about movies, and their accidental nature was brought home to me by reading about Collateral – Michael Mann’s generally well-reviewed film in which Tom Cruise plays a hit-man and Jamie Foxx the hapless taxi-driver who ferries him from murder to murder. The film plays with the idea of fateful contingency in a scene where Cruise’s character comes within a whisker of choosing another cab. And though I don’t suppose it’s intentional, this offers a neat metaphor for the Hollywood process: a big star deciding which of a queue of vehicles he’s going to use, and altering lives with the decision.As it happens, Cruise wasn’t the first person to be offered a ride.