“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books are suitable for meal-time reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere. The ones I learned so to use at Bookham were Boswell, and a translation of Herodotus, and Lang's ‘History of English Literature’. ‘Tristram Shandy’, ‘[Essays of ] Elia’ and ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ are all good for the same purpose.”