“It was not a lunch calculated to cheer his mind...As he sat sadly consuming that impassive pale substance known to the English as “cheese” unqualified (for there are cheese which go openly by their names, as Stilton, Camembert, Gruyere, Wensleydale or Gorgonzola, but “cheese” is cheese and everywhere the same), he inquired of the waiter the whereabouts of Mr. Crimplesham’s office. ”
I am delighted to find evidence that Dorothy Sayers was distrustful of "cheese."
[Professor] Tinker had written to...the London Times Literary Supplement, asking if anyone knew of any letters of Boswell in private custody. The Times of London is not only the best printed newspaper in the world, it is the only one in which anything whatever printed causes eventual ricochet. One issue, regardless of date, is as good as another; it is printed on paper too asbestic for good kindling, so it is rarely destroyed. And it is read, not in a hurry, by the kind of elderly dons, parsons, eccentrics, to whom reading is dram and drug. In this instance, reply was prompt and explicit: Professor Tinker got an anonymous communication: 'Try Malahide Castle.'"
Frederick Pottle's introduction to James Boswell's London Journal, which describes unearthing a bawdy private diary from 1762 that the Boswell family had kept hidden in a cabinet for hundreds of years, is nearly as delightful as the book itself.
When I write, there is something that I want to say. It can come from these really odd moments of sitting around for months and months and getting very upset about the high levels of black unemployment in this country and feeling only Kendrick Lamar was speaking to that angst, then saying "If I have to get this out to someone, I want to see if someone else wants to engage in this conversation." And so with these heavy ideas you always consider what's the way to make sure all of these ideas I'm feeling get understood? So the writing becomes this larger landscape or a geography of making sense of things. I think about writing as mapping out points of consideration.
From an excellent interview with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, whose profile of Dave Chappelle in The Believer was one of the best things I've read in a very long time.