I was walking through a festival in Alexandria when I saw a book that caught my eye.

Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.

This was the book that made his fortune and allowed him to become a full time man of letters. I was thrilled.

But no. It’s a blank journal. The old book (it must have been from the thirties or twenties, at least) has been eviscerated and the words of an important figure of the English Romantic movement, a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, thrown out to make room for whatever insipid thoughts contemporary humanity sees fit to record.

A bad bargain.