(Audio)Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 123

To be alive as Chaucer was not the same as to be alive as Milton - or Tennyson, or Eliot, or Plath.

- Peter Whitfield

Big up the British

Satire is what we, the British, have always done better than anybody. From Chaucer, Swift and Alexander Pope to Chris Morris (The Day Today, Brass Eye, Four Lions), savage and comic lampoons of the age’s ignorance, delusions and cruelties have been as much a part of what this nation is as poetry, cathedrals and binge drinking.

- Bryan Appleyard, 'On Satire'