Big, bold, beautiful ideas

I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would have called ‘a half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. Fellow half-educateds of similar proclivities will doubtless recall that scene in the third chapter of Our Mutual Friend, when Gaffer Hexam shows Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn the handbills of the missing persons that he has pasted all over his wall:

He waved the light over the whole, as if to typify the light of his scholarly intelligence. ‘They pretty well papers the room, you see; but I know ’em all. I’m scholar enough!’

For Gaffer’s handbills, I have my copies of books by Niall Ferguson, Tristram Hunt, Neil MacGregor and the like, which I proudly flaunt in my bookshelves, in the vain hope that they might somehow illuminate my dim understanding of history, culture and the great wide world beyond my teeny tiny and immediate grasp.