Debunking Greek myths

A book, a bottle, a bower set in an ancient garden: you think that if you walked round the right corner, there would be England, putting manure on the roses. Kipling reminds us that gardening is hard work and that beauty depends on bent backs. True enough, but they also serve who only sit and admire.

There was a further contrast between hard work and sedentary admiration, for the book was the first volume of Kenneth Rose’s journals: the easiest of reads, yet the product of hard labour. Kenneth was an exemplar of his craft. There has never been a more meticulous journalist. If only the same were true of those who edited the volume. Kenneth did not believe in an afterlife, but if he turned out to be wrong, he will have begged leave of absence from whichever region he found himself inhabiting, in order to inflict haunting and persecution on those responsible for the apparatus criticus.