Most of them are rubbish and do not help me understand him

Got some of Hardy's poems out of Holborn library ... Most of them are rubbish and do not help me understand him. They make me think of him as wallowing and moaning and wishing for the olden days and that he hadn't been such a cunt to his wife.

N. Stibbe, cited in J. Rogers, 'Living in someone else's life', SF88 (2025), 55

Heaven might comprise eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

Meanwhile, Smith's Christianity was one we might all enjoy. With God he was on good terms. God is, he wrote, best served by 'regular tenour of good actions ... the luxury of a false religion is to be unhappy'. And, on a trip to Brussels, he noted 'I think, possibly correctly, that Heaven might comprise eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets.'

S. Bayley, 'Taking the short view', SF87 (2025), 25

Good typography is the glass lamp that shields the candle of civilization

But why should any of this matter? Is it not merely what my friends are pleased to call 'font fetishism'? Does all this talk of kerning and the Golden Section not reek of pretension? I don't think so. For although typography considers written words as aesthetic entities in their own right, it does not forget that they are first and foremost the servants of sense. The ultimate purpose of typography is to make reading as pleasant as might be, sparing the reader discomfort and distraction, and thereby freeing that reader's energy and intellect to attend to what the words mean. Good typography is the glass lamp that shields the candle of civilization, that its light may shine through steady and clear.

M. Fisher, 'Philosophical designs', Slightly Foxed 75 (2022), 62

Chances are you'll notice that it's a shallow, narcissistic whine

Books have their own sweet spot. Some arrive too late (the window for The Cather in the Rye is narrow; read it after the age of 16, and chances are you'll notice that it's a shallow, narcissistic whine) and some too soon: I was put off the whole of Russian literature by too early an encounter with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But others have perfect pitch and perfect timing, and recalling your first encounter is like remembering a summer day from your teens. They're the books that lodge in your heart while it's still wide open. and they become the platform the reading that you'll do ever after.

I read enough at that age to have a fairly wide platform, even it 's one whose strength I've not often tested in the intervening years. Nobody wants to discover that they're walking on rotting woodwork.

M. Herron,'Partying down at the Palace', Slightly Foxed 66 (2020), 35