Modern hymns are awful. I don't know why they bothered.

As with the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, you do not have to be a Christian, or even a believer, to appreciate and be uplifted by hearing a church full of people singing something out of Hymns Ancient and Modern. Modern hymns are awful. I don't know why they bothered. If they felt the words were outdated, and so of limited appeal to the young, it would not have been beyond the wit of an Anglican subcommittee to write new ones to the old tunes. But no, baby went out with the bathwater and we got slush and soup and sentimentality.

S. Hill, Jacob's room is full of books (2017), 207

That is what time does to literature

It is seventy plus years since those days through which we live in the two war [Balkan and Levant] trilogies. Olivia Manning died in 1980. I wonder if it matters how much she wrote out of her own direct experience and how much she created from her imagination - 'made up'.

Does it ever matter? Only at the time, perhaps. A decade, or half a century later, it is all one. The books stand or fall by themselves. That is what time does to literature. And these novels stand. They come up fresh every re-reading.

S. Hill, Jacob's room is full of books (2017), 168

Literature was born when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him

He [Nabokov] has a point, and the point makes me think, but it does not give me the lightening flash of illumination that this does, a page or two later: 'Literature was born, not on the day a boy came crying wolf, wolf out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.'

S. Hill, Jacob's room is full of books (2017), 145
She is citing here Nabokov's Lectures on literature, which I now want to read