“So we spent our undergraduate years awash in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and Middle English, living with Beowulf and Sir Gawain,... and we were required to pay hardly any attention to the 19th-century novel, and not much to the 18th. As for the 20th century, it might have never arrived. As a friend of mine said, ‘They taught us to believe in dragons.”

“So we spent our undergraduate years awash in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and Middle English, living with Beowulf and Sir Gawain,... and we were required to pay hardly any attention to the 19th-century novel, and not much to the 18th. As for the 20th century, it might have never arrived. As a friend of mine said, ‘They taught us to believe in dragons.”

— Marcus Sedgwick