Sometimes the names of my father's medications sound almost poetic: one is called Allegra, another Stalevo. Requip has more of a manly, workshop air to it. It sounds like the poem "The Children's Hour": "Stalevo/And laughing Allegra/And Requip with golden hair."

BTW, one of the reasons I so love my sole reader, aside from the fact that we're related, is that he/you own Walter Bagehot.

At the moment the book I have in the back of the car for unexpected waits is the Oxford Book of Prose, or some such title. It has very short excerpts: two paragraphs from Leigh Hunt, a page of Hakluyt, like that. It's enough (almost) to make me want to read Emerson and Thoreau, two big FAT lacunae in my intellectual armor.