We have surrendered our personal details to Google and Facebook; Amazon has killed the high street; Twitter has created its own lurid brand of online bullying; real jobs—both skilled and unskilled—have been lost to “robotisation”.

While we are right to be wary of the “winner-takes-all” internet monopolists described by Andrew Keen, there are reasons to be cheerful.

Research and scholarship have benefited enormously from the digitisation of archives and libraries. Whereas once a reader might have had to make an appointment to visit an archive or university—possibly abroad and involving great expense of time and money—it is now possible to rifle through diaries, letters and photographs on a computer at home. No white gloves, no anxiously hovering librarian, no danger of sneezing on an annotated first edition.

Of course you do not feel the weight of the paper or the ribbons used to bind the bundles, or sit in the library where the Great Man or Woman would have sat, but unless the reader is writing a biography, this degree of immersion may be beyond the call of duty—and the practicality of the deadline. 

With any piece of research, I now look for a relevant digital archive. There is a delight in the intimacy and insight that comes from reading personal letters and faithful diaries, rather than second-hand in a biography. There is the sense of the serendipitous find, of discovering something others might have missed.

Curious, for example, about Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy and Deborah “Debo” Mitford, after Debo’s death last year, and what it might have been like for them to marry William and Andrew Cavendish, the heirs to the Chatsworth estate, I read the letters Kick wrote from England to her ambassador father, Joseph Kennedy and mother Rose during the Second World War. They are available on the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

Staying with the old Duchess of Devonshire, Kick despaired: “It’s odd how people in this country who possess so much have so little idea about things which Americans consider quite essential to the ordinary way of life. There is no soap in one’s bedroom, sugar or butter at breakfast . . . My lovely, historical Elizabethan bed is most uncomfortable.”

As well as papers—thousands of them—relating to the 1960 John F. Kennedy campaign and subsequent Presidency, there is a detailed inventory of every item to have been found in the Oval Office, including the foam pad the President had made to support his back when sitting in his black leather “executive chair”.

There is also a series of increasingly fraught letters between the editor of US Vogue and Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary arranging an appointment for the First Lady to sit for the society photographer Cecil Beaton. “Mr Beaton photographs very quickly, and the sitting should not require more than an hour or an hour-and-a-half of Mrs Kennedy’s time.”

On this side of the Atlantic, the website for the Margaret Thatcher Foundation gathers material from the National Archives at Kew, her personal papers in Cambridge and the Reagan Library in Los Angeles. Anyone interested in the night of her election victory in May 1979 will be tickled by a scrappy, scribbled aide-memoire of the St Francis prayer in blue ink, which she quoted on the steps of Downing Street, having clutched it in her palm and studied it in the car from Buckingham Palace. The note reads: “Discord—harmony. Error—truth. Doubt—faith. Despair—hope.”

For a cynical view of prime ministers and their works, read the letters—more than 50 years of them—in the Gertrude Bell archive on the University of Newcastle website. Bell, who helped in the founding of modern Iraq, wrote pertly from Baghdad on January 3, 1921: “As for statecraft I really think you might search our history from end to end without finding poorer masters of it than Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.”