Michael Foley’s book starts like this:
Back in the days of local bookshops: Ottokar’s in High Wycombe a magical place to browse and buy new; and a half-dozen excellent second-hand shops in Penn, and Princes Risborough. They were the good days, before Waterstone’s. Now of course we have Amazon, eBay, WOB, Abebooks.
I bought these two books in Ottokar’s when they were newly published:
I spent my early childhood in Sussex, after arriving from Australia in 1946, It has various villages with names ending in -ing, such as Worthing, Goring, Angmering, Ferring, Steyning, Fulking and Ditchling, where Eric Gill, the artist and typeface designer, once lived. So I couldn’t resist finding a font I liked. You can download it easily in all its variations. Gill’s most famous type face is Gill Sans.
Thumbing through Foley’s book, I find this masterly depiction of an everyday train of thought, from Ulysses:
His book is fun, we can relate to it, or am I being presumptuous here? No, this is a colourful parody of everyday life, or as it used to be in the days when pedestrians wouldn’t be absorbed in the sounds and sights offered by their (often invisible) smartphone.
Now let’s look a Grudin’s book. What is its title offering? Great things as superior to ordinary. Creativity as a path to transcending the everyday same-old. (We could allow ourselves to be distracted by the apparent vastness of AI, which answers our questions before we express them properly. No!)
I open The Grace of Great Things at random. It’s about Beethoven’s Great Fugue in his Op 130. Check it on YouTube if you must. On the next page he writes about Cornelis Drebbel: click for all you need to know about him in Wikipedia.
PS Today June 8th, 2026, I recall having quoted from Grudin’s book in these posts: The Cycle of Imperfection; Eternity in the City. And it’s the same quote. I ought not to be so hard on him.
It would be easy to indulge many more pages of comparison between the two authors, ilustrating
– displays of erudition for the amusement of readers, on the one hand
– or for their own pleasure and sense of superiority?
I shall be British here, and say no more. Reader, be your own judge
Correction to the above: I shall make fun of Prof Grudin’s chapter on school-teaching. He speaks of higher education, Plato & mavericks like Gurdjieff. No acknowledgement of the “three Rs” – Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic, per the ancient British jest.
He criticises the system of training teachers in colleges, supposing that it suppresses creativity.
As it happens I got a teaching job after graduating with a degree in French and Italian literature. The Birmingham (UK) education authority needed a replacement teacher for a remedial class in a poor suburb called Winson Green, near a prison. At least one of the parents was currently inside. The children, aged 7 to 11, were kept in a small room under a staircase. I was to observe and assist their existing teacher till the last week before Christmas. In the New Year I was on my own.
She’d tried to show me that all you could do was discipline them. Then they could focus on letter, numbers and pictures.
I’ll continue on desktop computer…