I called in at the London Library in order to attend the retirement party of Inez Lynn, who has been a librarian there since 1988 – cataloguer of Italian books, then Head of Cataloguing, Deputy Librarian in 1994, and Librarian since 2002 (only the tenth since the Library was founded by Thomas Carlyle in 1841). It must have been early in her time that the subscription was jacked up from under £200 a year to well over £400, an act which was deplored by many of the Library’s scholarly members, but has enabled the Library to flourish, expand and thrive, and recruit more younger members, a lesson to all those voluntary organisations which depend on their members to survive. The other thing which she oversaw was the new building development, designed by Haworth Tompkins, which greatly changed the atmosphere of the library to its benefit, making it more modern, more hospitable and less creaky. She had asked to have a clock for her retirement present in order to mark the imminent control of her time.