The Stalinists have taken over the London Library

The lights blazed out across St James’s Square from the high, first-floor Reading Room of the London Library as members crowded up the handsome staircase, last Thursday evening, to take part in the fiercest row the library has seen for many years, or maybe ever. Some members had to squeeze on to narrow upper galleries, where you search out dusty dictionaries in obscure languages. From there, they intervened in the to-and-fro of hot argument down below, like shabby cherubs in a Raphael painting.
This wasn’t some minor fluttering in a dovecot for eggheads. The London Library is one of the capital’s most discreet but most valuable adornments. Tucked away behind an unassertive Victorian frontage, it was founded by Thomas Carlyle because the Reading Room of the British Museum wouldn’t lend; its successor, the British Library, has the same policy. The outcome, 150 years later, is a wondrous collection of books which the 8,000 subscribers can wander through and take out to read at home.