Strange company
April 7, 2008
Visiting Leeds City Art Gallery yesterday, I was delighted to see a portrait of Homer on the wall of their newly refurbished Tiled Hall Cafe – admittedly no-one knows what Homer looked like, and the whole idea of ‘Homer’ is fraught with controversy anyway, but we’ll let that pass. His fellow luminaries were Horace (hooray!), Dante (fine), Goethe (OK), Macaulay (who?), Burns (why?), and Scott (oh please). A very Victorian list of worthies. I used to keep track of my ‘Top 10 Writers who Know’ and so on, but then saw the film of High Fidelity and was cured. (Reading How to Be Good cured me of actually reading Nick Hornby).
