A delicious novel

"Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaer, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohr[...]"

"To hear him speak French, if you didn't try to understand what he was saying, was as good as attending Phedre: he seemed a cloud that had divorced a textbook of geometry to marry Guillaume Appolinaire[...]"

"People did not like Mrs. Robbins, Mrs. Robbins did not like people; and neither was sorry."

"Jeremy Bentham's stuffed body would not have been ill at ease in their house."

"The other three Whittakers were not, like Flo, without atmosphere, bare well-meaning asteroids in a blue-black sky. Jerrold was almost courtly, like a wooden leg of the old school[...].

Reading Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution and enjoying it tremendously.