All our yesterdays....

LORD POLONIUS
What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET
Words, words, words.

(Hamlet II:2)

A thousand years ago (actually only 44 but it seems longer!) I had to read two Shakespeare plays a week, and prepare to discuss them with a far too bright Irish tutor who left no room for wiggling out of it. The tragedies and comedies were not so bad, the histories made for a heavy life.

The sixties was an amazing time to study in the University of Edinburgh - radical politicians (including G.Brown), "Student" magazine flirting with the legal authorities, the brand new mini-skirt (most male students would remember how they exploded onto the scene), Rector Malcolm Muggeridge creating impish mischief.

But in among all that - with the table tennis and the bar in the old (changed days) Men's Union - there was work.

Some of the reminders rest still on my shelves. Including the complete Signet Edition of Shakespeare. Ooops, I just noticed that somehow Tacitus got in there too. But there they are. I can cast my eye over them from my desk - Plato's Republic, Lipsey's Economics, Christopher Marlowe, a book on a programming language called Atlas Autocode. The latter is much deader than Latin, that's for sure. Owen Chadwick, Gerhard von Rad, Wilfred and William (Owen and Wordsworth!)

So tell me this! What was the process that had me absorb, reflect on, discuss, write about all those things in a way that forty-four years later I can barely comprehend?

Another tag - this time from Marlowe - comes to mind...

but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead. The Jew of Malta

p.s. - if you know this quote, or go to seek it out, you needn't take the context as being too autobiographical :)

p.p.s. - the image is not really badly shot - all these paperbacks are covered with a transparent stick-on stuff which has not lasted well. (A bit like me!)