Q's Legacy: A Delightful Account of a Lifelong Love Affair with Books

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

What fortune teller would ever have had the nerve to predict that the best years of my life would turn out to be my old age?

Prinny has been an unpopular monarch for 250 years. He spent fortunes on palaces and parks at a time when England needed all the money it could raise to finance the Napoleonic War. Well, the Napoleonic War was followed by the Crimean War and the Boer War and the First World War and the Second World War and they're all long gone. The Pavilion at Brighton and Windsor Castle and Regent Street and Carlton House Terrace and Regent's Park and the Nash Terraces are all still here. Blessings on your far-sighted spendthrift head, Prinny.

the pane I stared at longest was the one with a portrait of Izaak himself. He's sitting reading with his fishing-rod, net and creel beside him. And the serenity of the face reminded me of his line about the milkmaid: "She does not worry about things which will not be.

They didn't have the look of rare or fine books, they looked like the friends I needed them to be.

From the opposite shore my eight year-old self never dreamed she'd see the blue Atlantic was the same.

Our dear father has closed his virtuous and happy life in a manner almost as free of suffering as his children could have wished.

Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said. . . .

Their breakfast and dinner conversations aren't calculated to shield their children from the modern world. They just don't let the modern world rob childhood of its birthright