Books I've actually finished lately: 115

I will have such difficulty in becoming English again.

- TE Lawrence, letter to his mother, 29/08/1909

Theory of knowledge

FRENCH TEACHER*: Seven across: 'revered philosopher'.
PE TEACHER: Clarkson.

- Big School

--
* Don't bother...

Books I've actually finished lately: 110

'Etymology'

While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.

- Richard Hackluyt*, Principal Navigations (in Melville, Moby-Dick: 'Etymology - Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School')

--
* wonderfully misspelled by Melville, in all his sanctimony

Intellectuals

SAVIOUR OF HIS PEOPLE: Have you never used a hammer before?
WAISTCOAT AND SPECTACLES: Er... no.
SAVIOUR OF HIS PEOPLE: What is it you do, then?
WAISTCOAT AND SPECTACLES: I suppose you'd have to say I was - am - an intellectual.
SAVIOUR OF HIS PEOPLE: This is a job?
WAISTCOAT AND SPECTACLES: ...

- Defiance

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 99 / This Week's Literary Hero

His is one of those cases which are more numerous than those suppose who have never lived anywhere buy in their own homes, and never walked but in one line from their cradles to their graves. We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths for the by-ways and low-places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands see what has been wrought among our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship or vice.

- Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 96

Have a life lived instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses.... If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joys of working can fill your days.

- George Konrad

Dear Spotify,

Re your Mikado advertisement

there is no such word as 'mischeevious'.

Please tell your voice-over chap to get a grip on himself.

Yours, &c.

Found in books - GUEST ENTRY

John Williams’s Stoner is about an English professor defeated by department politics and his wife’s unreasoning hatred. In the copy I borrowed from my university library, someone had written, on the title page, Oddly comforting.

- Jamie Fisher, in the LA Review of Books

#LAD

11-year-old boy dresses as Christian Grey for World Book Day.

I was entirely on this kid's side... until I read the mother's rationalisation of it.

Found in books - 8

In A Handelian's Notebook, by William C Smith:

If. Only.

Favourite footnotes: 8

(A good dictionary and usage dictionary are strongly recommended. You're insane if you don't own these already.)

- David Foster Wallace, teaching materials (English 183D, Pomona College, 2008), in The David Foster Wallace Reader

And other things never overheard at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst*

As a Marine* lieutenant, I had always been told in times of uncertainty to go to the library.

- David J Morris, The Evil Hours: a Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

--
* don't bother.

Greatest line ever dropped casually into a curriculum vitae

I continued my education as an infantryman in Vietnam.

- Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States

'Trepverter'

Because the French have no word for 'l'esprit de l'escalier'.

(With thanks to the Guardian's 'education' pages...)

Books I've actually finished (again) lately: 59

I read the Iliad a long time ago but I was too young to appreciate it.

- Ludo, aged 11

War literature - what is it good for? (2)

Recently, I had [the] experience [of] listening to Major General John Borling (USAF, retired), a former fighter pilot and six-year Vietnam POW. When asked to name the most important courses he took as an Academy cadet, Borling immediately responded: “Humanities courses—art history, music appreciation, literature, introductory philosophy.”

- Thomas G McGuire, in War, Literature, & the Arts

War literature - what is it good for?

What are the humanities about if not the cultivation of an informed conscience, a habit of reflection in which the flow of thoughtless action and means-end calculation is interrupted by a consideration of historical contexts and ethical considerations, by an imaginative awareness of the character and consequences of action, by a deep investment in the human condition and its possibilities? If those with such knowledge and such capacities do not assume some kind of responsibility for worldly action, including the management of violence, then that responsibility passes to the Kilgores, and the Kurtzes, of the world. 

- Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America

Also

'An Ode to Photocopies', by Nick Ripatrazone.

No.2 is a poem unto itself.

And also (again):

The role of the high school English teacher is also not to create a legion of English majors — God help us — but rather to pause a student’s hectic and harried day and get them thinking about words.

John Updike

was rejected, twice, from Harvard's most prestigious creative writing class.

And other matters.