'If we confine our attention entirely to the slang of the day - that is to say, if we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature - we get to think the world is progressing when actually it is only repeating itself...[I]t is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realises how absolutely modern the best of old things are.'
Rudyard Kipling in Alan Jacobs, The Pleasure of Reading in an Age of Distraction, p.46.
