I never thought I'd be saying nice things about a book written by John Dean. Yet his new biography on my "living room icon," the Ohio wunderkund Warren Gamaliel Harding, who looks fondly down on my reading (and tippling) in my easy chair, keeps getting good reviews. I may have to take a peek at Dean's insights. Have you become a Friend of President Harding yet?

Boy, this is what government is all about, eh? In the lovely British town of Bury St. Edmunds, hanging plants that grace the lampposts have been banned because they might fall and hit people, or might bend the posts under the heavy weight. Not that any have fallen yet, mind you. Eating dinner tonight, I might swallow my spoon. I fully expect a spoon ban next week.

The constant plea of the advocates of revision [of the Anglican Psalter] is that 'the working man,' 'the uneducated,' 'the lower classes' -- all the pets and spoilt children of the present day -- are so puzzled by the dreadful old words, the strange constructions, etc., etc.! Now for more than fifty years we have been expending nearer hundreds of millions on the education of these poor dears; and what have we taught them? The answer is not readily forthcoming; but we seem to have untaught them a good deal. They can't, it seems, understand 'quick,' so we must make it 'alive,' and sacrifice one of the greatest phrases in English, 'the quick and the dead.' (Fancy 'the alive and the dead'!) And 'quick-silver'? and 'quick-sand'? But I suppose modern education does not concern itself with so treating a child that it will say to itself, 'I wonder why this difference between 'silver' and 'quick-silver'?' and be told and understand. Phonetics and civics and instruction in sex-questions, and statements of fads instead of facts about alcohol, no doubt leave no time for anything of that sort -- or, indeed, for Bible and Prayer Book lessons at all. George Saintsbury, 1923