It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shou… - Rebecca West

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.

There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the ancient world he built the modern world, and even now reflection on his feat quickens the pulse. It was an achievement as daring as any long transoceanic flight of our day, but it called also for endurance lasting not hours but decades, and for adventure of the mind as well as of the body ; a vast new political trajectory was described as well as a military one.