Great Books

In my comments, "Sheldon" linked to this interesting essay by Jonathan Rose, a brilliant historian of reading. One could refine some of Rose's positions a bit--there's a strong high-culture bias in some strands of Marxism, for example*--but his point about the "radical" possibilities inherent in the purportedly "conservative" Western tradition is perfectly correct. *--My father once showed me a copy of an English Marxist textbook designed to teach Greek to the proletariat.