The writer Patrick Leigh Fermor believed passionately in having well-stocked shelves of reference books close to hand, ‘…and they must be near the dinner table where arguments spring up which have to be settled then or never.’ The knowledge is now available at the touch of a fingertip. I wonder of reaching for the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the middle of the kleftiko was any more irritating than googling now is? Certainly a deal less convenient.
Photo: Rose Crescent, Cambridge, July 2011