Friday roundup

“Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre.” — Thoreau

• Literary voices : BBC puts recordings of Woolf, Steinbeck, Doyle, Waugh, Nabokov, and more online
• Margaret Drabble claims she us being pressured to “dumb down” her writing : “‘They don’t quite know whether I’m highbrow or literary,’ she said.”
• Bloomsbury gives it away : In order to get more back
• Will sell rare books for gas money : Signs of the times
• Recommended books on writing : Not this list, a different one
• Art beats science! : Doesn’t it? (In any case, Jonathan Hoeffler writes very small.)

Duly quoted

• “You should think of that as unthinkable.”
  — Press secretary Tony Fratto

News of the day

• Oct. 24, 1901: U.S. troops go on killing rampage in the Philippines

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