Those of you who, like me, have never upgraded from the old round Reading Room will be reassured to know that the new British Library retains many of the same characteristics, except, of course, that there are many more readers now that you don’t have to demonstrate your academic credentials and the public areas, which are strangely even more packed than the reading rooms – I assume because they provide somewhere warm and dry for students to sit at their laptops. Most of the books I ordered have to come from Boston Spa, but not all. What I particularly noticed is a different level of concentration if everyone is reading: a collective concentration, uninterrupted by chitchat and the mobile phone. I need to re-learn it.