(The Guermantes Way, tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

‘I find the task has grown on me and I continue with it for my own sake too . . . The experience is like nothing so much as spending time in their company and living with them.’

Plutarch is every bit as companionable as Herodotus. Good company at dinner: many stories, questions. They’d stay late.

'Contact with Greek culture came to him late in life, and he was really quite old when he took up Greek books and had his rhetorical style improved by Demosthenes, and to a lesser extent by Thucydides.'

Plutarch on Cato the Elder (Robin Waterfield's translation)

Jean Rhys being furious with Diana Athill that Wide Sargasso Sea went out with two unnecessary words: “then” and “quite”.

Sunday: Cristina Campo's essays (and puzzling over Kathryn Davis's faintly odd introduction - "a firm believer in destiny, she was also born with a yod in her chart, betokening an extraordinary and unshakeable sense of purpose").