Why does no one dress for dinner at Claridge’s any more?

F.Scott Fitzgerald declared in an excellent late story that ‘the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things’. It is certainly what I am striving to do. I have far too much stuff so I’ve decided a little culling is needed. Some weeding out imperative, deaccessions inevitable. I’ve started with books; I’ll end up with people and finish with me.

I kneel on the floor of my book room with a large cardboard box at my side. Do I really need all those George Meredith novels? Edgar Saltus is harder, but will I miss those duplicates of Purple and Fine Women and The Pace That Kills with the variant dust-wrapper and the misprint on page 43? My shelf of the works of Philip Thicknesse, that querulous 18th-century gentleman, contains nearly all of his 24 books, and if I were forced to sell them I could never sacrifice The Valetudinarians Bath Guide, which contains valuable information on the exorcism of gallstones, and an account of Mrs Mary Toft of Godalming who claimed that she gave birth to 15 rabbits; an assertion Thicknesse plausibly supports.