Peter Batten muses about which books to read…

Recently, whenever I search for a book on Amazon, I am invited to purchase a ‘Kindle’. This, I am told, will give me access to hundreds of books. But how will I know which I will want to read?

This is a question which several of my English teachers of 60 years ago would have been eager to answer for me. They were very sure of the importance of ‘English’ in the school curriculum. In their view, which had been formed by their tutors at Cambridge, our culture was at a vital moment of change. For several centuries the foundation of our culture had been the study of Latin and Greek, but that foundation was crumbling. Our salvation would be the development of English studies, based on a carefully-trained reading of our literature. As their tutors had guided them, so would they teach us to “discriminate”, to separate the wheat from the chaff and benefit from reading the finest examples of our literature.
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