Sir Alec Guinness and Ovid

From A Positively Final Appearance:

Before leaving for our eight-day holiday with our friend Marriott White in Baden-Baden...I got very fussy about what to take to read. A little pile was made of Herodotus, Elmore Leonard's thriller Out of Sight, Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Piers Paul Read's new novel, Knights of the Cross.  (p.40)

In the past few weeks there have been suggested all sorts of new schemes for quickly getting rid of unwanted babies in the womb. In my head I hear a snatch of office chatter. 'Free for lunch today?' 'Awfully sorry, no. I thought I'd just slip out and have an abortion.' If the human race survives to the third millenium will our age be given a thought? Will we be hailed as the pioneers of cloning or dismissed as a trashy slip-up after the centuries of recognizable values? Most likely the future will be ignorant of the fact that we even existed. (p.49)

A few days ago, rummaging in a drawer of batteries, film spools, etc., I spotted a sixty-minute cassette tape I must have recorded ten years or more ago of various poems or speeches I had wished to learn...The tape included 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Ulysses' great cynical speech from Troilus, beginning ''Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back', the nineteenth psalm, poems by Robert Graves, R.S. Thomas, Vaughan and Herbert, and the Duke of Burgundy's marvellous evocation of the French countryside in his championship of the peace towards the end of Henry V. (p.84)

Somewhere along the line of the day I managed to buy Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (and read 'Echo and Narcissus' immediately with intense pleasure while having a haircut; I refrained from looking in the mirror). (p.112)