It's a metaphor

Do you remember the days when Britney ruled the world? When she was the confident, successful young woman who seemed to have coped remarkably well with child stardom? When she continually pulled out of the bag not only the top rank pop songs like Toxic but the edgier interesting album tracks like Do Something? And then the two divorces, the left-field parenting, all those no-knickers-getting-out-of-a-cab pictures, the crazy statements, the impulsive flights from rehab – suddenly she was clearly going down a bad road, and that’s continued, and will she ever be able to pull herself round? She may still be producing good music, but if the headlines tomorrow said “Britney dead of overdose” how much surprise would there be in your sadness? And there’s absolutely nothing we can do to change the direction, like a lorry skidding towards the pavement. That’s how I feel about the BL, which has produced some of the best manuscript scholars of the modern period – Frederic Madden, Francis Douce, Frederic Warner, E. M. Thompson, Julian Brown, Francis Wormald, Robin Flower, J. P. Gilson, E. A. Bond, H. C. Coxe, Derek Turner, G. Davis, E. G. Millar, Michelle Brown, Janet Backhouse, and probably others who escape me. I don’t know if any university (including Oxford and Cambridge) could produce a more impressive list of names in this field, but yet the idea of knowledgeable curatorship seems to be not in the least valued there. A friend at the BL told me how surprised the managers are if they discover that the person who knows most about some particular thing is already at the library, rather than being approachable as an external consultant.