One of my favorite pastimes is to browse the stacks in the basement of the college library where most books are labelled "STORAGE" and virtually forgotten. I'm ever in the ire of the girls at the check-out counter for bringing them dusty old barcode-less books.

One book has jumped out at me a few times and till now I've been happy just to smile at the title: Things That Have Interested Me, by Arnold Bennett (1921).

It is exactly what it sounds like, viz. a collection of small observations, many no more than a page, and rarely as interesting as Andy Rooney.

Here's a sample:

SEX EQUALITY

London is really a very remarkable city. The other day, according to the papers, there was trouble in a London restaurant because a lady smoked therein. A waiter asked her to desist. She refused. Then, according to his own account, the waiter knocked the cigarette out of her mouth. Who would have thought such an incident possible, if it had not occurred? Nothing is commoner in truly fashionable restaurants than smoking by ladies.

I must pause here to wonder whether eating was not commoner, but perhaps that's not truly fashionable.

But apparently restaurants of a more bourgeois type have a different code. The sad fact is that the fight for sex equality is not yet over. It is won, but not finished, and a "sort of war" persists in odd corners of the battlefield.

I must pause again to wonder whether war always persists in battlefields, and not simply in odd corners, whether battlefields in which war does not persist cease to be battlefields (commemorative parks excepted), and whether "sort of war" is meant to be a quote or "sort of colloquial," in which case it's "sort of annoying."

And there are still public places where even daring and desperate women do not venture to smoke.

Not even the desperate?

A duchess might smoke in a restaurant-car of a train, but she would never smoke on the top of an omnibus. Still, evolution proceeds. I can remember the time when a lady who travelled at all on the top of an omnibus risked her reputation in doing so.

If you're good I may just share with you "Brains and Eating," which I haven't yet read but I hope dearly that it's about zombies.

Of course I'm sure most of you are holding out for "More Efficient House-Keeping."