He had also bought a gift for Henry: a corpus of Mycenaean inscriptions from Knossos. I looked through it. It was an enormous book. There was no text, only photograph after photograph of broken tablets with the inscriptions—in Linear B—reproduced in facsimile in the bottom. Some of the fragments had only a single character. “He’ll like this,” I said. “Yes, I think he will,” said Francis. “It was the most boring book I could find. I thought I might drop it off after dinner.”
