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摘要

Will Pryce starts with an anecdote from his student days - of not getting any joy from the Royal College of Art Library and having to decamp to the then Round Reading Room of the British Library, which was still in use within the British Museum. Left on the table next to his was 'Last Letters from Stalingrad'; and as one is inclined, he tells me, to find the books of others' more interesting than your own, he spent his day absorbed in the last missives home of Hitler's doomed 6th Army at the hands of the 'encircling Bolsheviks'. Only after he'd finished and looked around did it dawn on him that Marx had sat in the same place a century before and written Das Kapital - and a link in time was made between those terrified soldiers, Communism, and himself. 'It made me think that libraries contain books, that books contain ideas and that sometimes ideas can be dangerous.'