A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought

I was flicking through the channels yesterday when ITV3, which seems to be dedicated entirely to repeats of old adaptations of golden age murder mysteries, produced an episode of the late 80s version of Dorothy L. Sayers' Have His Carcase. This was a big nostalgia thing for me because I watched them with my parents the first time round, when I was 10, and consequently read the books. Sayers first invented Wimsey as a frivolous character, who acts foppishly to hide his debilitating shell shock, particularly in Murder Must Advertise, where he spends much of the time dressed as a harlequin. But once the Harriet Vane books start he's much more serious. In the last Harriet is investigating some nasty poison pen letters and vandalism at a women's college in Oxford, and fears to discover that the chaste spinster life will have turned some of the fellows loony; only to find out that the perpetrator is a "normal" woman with children. She marries Wimsey anyway. I fell head over heels in love with Peter Wimsey; I did realise even at the time that it was a bit naff he was a lord, but I couldn't resist his intelligence and his patience with Harriet Vane. I used to follow up the quotations at the start of each chapter, and also the quotations made by Harriet and Peter if I could tell where they came from. This was a harder thing to do before the internet made it easy to find obscure books, and when I had very little money to spend, but I put a list of items on the wall by my bed and tracked them down over a long period, and in that way discovered some really excellent books. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici; the poetry of Donne and Herbert; Tristram Shandy; Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; Ernest Bramah's The Wallet of Kai Lung; Boccaccio's Decameron; and probably others I can't think of right now. And coincidentally this morning my post included another of them, a copy of Thomas Lovell Beddoes' Death's Jest Book, which I only recently managed to track down in an affordable paperback edition. It's a mad nineteenth-century blank verse attempt at a Jacobean Revenge tragedy by one of those romantics who took it all rather hard and eventually killed themselves. The list of characters ends with "Homunculus Mandrake, zany to a mountebank", and it all looks rather hard work, but I'm in just the mood for that given that most modern fiction is rubbish.

Hurray for Dorothy L. Sayers! She was an interesting individual too. She fell head over heels in love with someone who was not really a very good idea. He asked her to go and live with him; for religious reasons she said No sex outside marriage; he replied that marriage was a bourgeois institution to which he objected on multitudinous very high-minded grounds. This stalemate continued for a while; then he suddenly married someone else. She felt like an utter fool to have taken his objections seriously rather than personally, and naturally went out and slept with the first man she met -- a lodger in the same house as her, who worked on motorcycles. She got pregnant from this. She managed to conceal it from everyone, and for the last couple of months went away to stay with a cousin of hers who took in foster children, but she arranged for her mail and phone calls to be relayed to her so efficiently that no one even knew she had left London. She left the baby with her cousin and supported him from afar. Whatever psychological damage she may have done to this poor kid who didn't even know that this frequent visitor was his mother until he was 10 or so, I can't help admiring someone so human but also so efficient at coping with a difficult and at the time very scandalous circumstance. She continued to support herself through her writing, and eventually married someone terribly shell-shocked; they "adopted" her son. She was renowned for striding around Oxford in strange clothes humming Bach loudly to herself.